Mistakes

Note: This piece was posted two weeks after it was written and, due to the time gap, just posted in its incomplete form. Corrections or add-ins may later follow. Also, due to the lack of me going over this carefully some things may make absolutely no logical sense, in which case you can let me know.

I read an interesting piece in my psychology textbook today that mentioned a study in which participants were left in a room with puzzles of varying difficulty. When this study was done on Americans, they generally chose to work on the puzzles that were easier to solve. When the same study was done on Chinese people, they tended to choose the puzzles of greater difficulty. The study found that Americans tended to choose the easier puzzles out of a fear of failing, whereas Chinese people chose the more difficult puzzles, viewing a challenge as a learning opportunity. The textbook added that we could benefit from viewing challenges in this way.

However, I find this issue most pertinent in regard to the most common form of failure: the mistake. Culturally, we tend to associate a mistake with having done something wrong and I'd like to insist that this view is not only unhealthy, but is a skewed way of defining our morality. I'd like to make the case that a mistake is not a wrongdoing or transgression, but rather, like most other concepts, is value-neutral, its right or wrong value determined by the individual. I'd like argue that a mistake is an opportunity to learn a lesson. If we learn that lesson, then the mistake was an important and valuable life experience and if we don't, then, and only then, can we view the mistake as a failure. Not a failure in the mistake itself, but a failure in the ability to learn from it.

One of the most popular yearbook quotes in the United States is the famous line by Wayne Gretzky, "You miss 100% of the shots you never take." Often the biggest mistake one can make is not making one. I recently saw a trailer for a movie called Yes Man. The plot of the movie is that a man who generally responds with a 'no' toward life opportunities commits to always responding with a 'yes' and his life is improved as a result. The point the movie is trying to make is that, while obviously we shouldn't answer every question with a yes, far too often we respond with a no. We are afraid to take risks and venture out into the unknown because we are afraid of making a mistake.

Sometimes the best thing we can do is make a mistake. Sometimes we will make a mistake that teaches us things we could never have learned otherwise, making it a mistake that we would never ever take back because what it taught us is priceless. Sometimes we make a mistake that alters our life forever and alters it for the positive. If you go through life and you don't make any significant mistakes you can't call what you did living. If you think life is like some novel where everything works out and everyone is perfect then you don't understand what life is. Mistakes aren't just a "part of life," something which you have to live through, mistakes are life itself. A mistake indicates that someone did something, who cares if they succeeded, they put themselves on the line for the sake of something worthwhile.

If I look back on what of life I've lived there isn't all that much I regret doing. But there is noteworthy list of things I regret not doing; things I should have done but didn't, times where I could have acted but stood by passively and could've, and in fact should've done something. Don't stand by and be safe. Act. Take a risk. Go outside your comfort zone and do the thing you're too afraid, shy, or embarrassed to. And don't be too embarrassed to admit that you've made real mistakes to someone, that's the whole point I'm trying to make. There's nothing wrong at all with making mistakes. We're supposed to go through life making mistakes, it's the primary way we learn anything.

This blog post has spanned more days to write than any other post and it's not just because my laptop ran out of power at the beginning of the third paragraph. This is a post coming from more experience than I could ever want at my age and lessons that took me too long to learn. Making a mistake and admitting it to someone else is so embarrassing for us because we have to admit we're not perfect. And the problem really is that our vision of perfect is so skewed. A perfect person isn't someone who is a super-everything who never errs or trips up with anything. A real perfect person makes mistakes and does his or her best to learn from them, and it can be a slow process.