Don’t Be Afraid to Make Mistakes

Mistakes are common when we don’t applied the right principles to our actions. They occur when we fail to apply the lessons being taught to us. Unfortunately, committing mistakes are sometimes dealt with punishments or embarrassments.

I believe there are many of us who have encountered such events in our lives. It got engraved in our minds so that we begin to fear committing errors. We fear failures. We expect to excel the first time around and come off instantly with flying colors. Well, unless you’re a perfect being, a Deity perhaps, then you are an exception to flaws. The famous and the greatest inventor of his time, Thomas Edison, is a quintessential example. Once interviewed about his progress on the right filament for his lightbulb, Edison said that he didn’t fail 10,000 times. He asserted that he learned 10,000 ways on how not to create a lightbulb. Of course, we know the story. His discovery of the bamboo filament for the incandescent bulb immortalized him for the ages to come. What about the Wright brothers? Were they able to come up with the airplane the first time? Of course not! Who knows how many times they’ve fumbled on their attempts to come up with the right framework for an airplane. They kept making mistakes, one after another. But eventually, they learned from it. They didn’t dwell on their errors but instead sought ways on how to provide solution to their dilemma. They dared to fail, and now, we can see various aircrafts dominating the sky.

So why fear mistakes? We should come to understand that learning is associated with it. It is through the repetition of these flaws that we are able to really understand the gist behind the lesson.

If you’re just going to sit there like a couch potato for fear of failure, you’ll never get ahead in life. You’re going to live in sheer mediocrity and won’t be able to bring out your true potential. Mistakes are to be expected when someone decides to move out of his comfort zone and move to an upper scale. It’s the attitude towards mistakes that counts. Because it is inevitable, how we cope and deal with it is more likely what matters most in the end. Mark Zuckerberg, one of the youngest billionaires of this era, had lots of mistakes during the early years of Facebook with regards to managing his company. But he chose to learn from it and went on to become the number one social network today.

So face your fears and don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Repeat them but don’t dwell on them. Instead, learn from them.