THURSDAY MEDITATION
Celebrate That Mistake!
Your Mistakes are a Necessary Stop on the Road to Success
The world does a spectacularly good job of chastizing you for your mistakes.
You don’t need to add to the criticism. Yet, most people are not kind to themselves. It starts innocently by being hard on oneself for making a mistake. Before they realize it, people hate themselves.
Mistakes are inevitable. It is a part of being human. Beating ourselves up for something inevitable is silly, isn’t it? Yet, all of mankind responds violently to mistakes.
There is no need for us to join the crowd and beat ourselves up for making mistakes.
Yes — we will identify mistakes and correct them. But beat ourselves for it? Nope.
I offer a counterintuitive life hack to help make peace with mistakes.
Celebrate Your Mistakes.
Don’t Make the Same Mistake Twice
One of the perks of playing bridge is I get a chance to meet people who have made it big in life.
I asked a successful person for life advice. “Mistakes are acceptable. Intelligent people take care not to make the same mistake twice.”
Jeff Bezos made a similar point in an interview. It is okay to fail in unchartered waters, he said. However, it is not okay to screw up in situations with clearly defined processes.
Celebrate that first mistake — it provides insight.
Practice Makes Perfect
Check out an initial version of Google’s website or Amazon’s website. You most likely cringed. Yet, these initial versions, ugly as they may be, were necessary first steps in their journey to success.
Michael Jordan or Roger Federer wouldn’t have got it right the first time. They put in years of practice to achieve what they did.
If you don’t step into the tennis court, you can’t practice your serve.
If you don’t write those crappy articles, you can’t practice your writing.
If you don’t draw those ugly sketches, you can’t practice sketching.
Practice makes perfect. You don’t want to quit halfway because you’re unhappy with the results so far. You want to let time do her thing.
Your job is to stay in the game and practice.
Celebrating your mistake is a powerful way to deliver this message to your brain.
Celebrating Your Mistakes Helps You Conquer Resistance
Perfection is the enemy of all kinds of progress.
Wanting to be perfect gives rise to fear of failure. Steven Pressfield gives a name to this specific kind of fear: Resistance.
Being okay with mistakes is the way to conquer resistance.
Celebrate that mistake.
As a first step towards conquering resistance.
Celebrate That Mistake
Let the world beat themselves for their mistakes if they so like.
You don’t have to join them.
You recognize that mistakes are a necessary stop on the road to success.
Celebrate that mistake.
