Make Mistakes + Learn From Them = SUCCESS
So many people don’t try something new or don’t attempt to move towards their goals out of a fear of making a mistake. They equate mistakes with failure. Yet, as Elbert Hubbard said, “The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one,” and he was right.
Some people also equate mistake with failure not realizing they are two different things entirely. I’ve know this for a while, but a post I read today reminded me of this fact. If we continue to make the same mistakes over time, we become failures. If we learn from our mistakes—and choose to do things differently—over time we achieve success. As John Powell said, “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
Pretty simple formula, really. Make mistakes + learn from them = success.
That doesn’t mean that we won’t make more mistakes in the future, but we must keep learning from our mistakes. Everyone knows that Thomas Edison didn’t “fail” when it came to creating the light bulb, although most people say he failed many times (the number of times varies considerably from one story to the next) before he created the light bulb. He actually just made many mistakes in his invention process. Those mistakes caused his invention, the light bulb, to fail. Edison actually succeeded because he learned from his mistakes. He persevered until all the lessons he learned from is mistakes brought him to a point of success: the light bulb turned on!
This concept reminds me of another quote (I’m full of them today) from T. Harv Eker: “You are only as successful as your current habits.” If we allow the things we do that are “mistakes” to become habits that don’t work for us, we never move past where we are at this moment. Those mistake-based actions and behaviors turn into our normal way of being in the world and prevent us from succeeding, from reaching our goals. In other words, they cause us to fail. That’s why we have to examine how our actions—our habits—contribute to our failure. We have to learn from them and change our behaviors to achieve success.
We can also learn from other people’s mistakes and failures. That’s why Jews read the Torah over and over again; we learn from our Biblical ancestor’s mistakes—and successes. That’s why people love to listen to inspirational and motivational speakers; they tell great stories about how others (or the speaker) overcame obstacles or changed behavior or learned from mistakes and succeeded.
Today, be courageous. Make a mistake and learn from it. Look at your habits and change them. Move closer to success.
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April 25th, 2010 at 1:32 am
Nina, Very inspiring post! Recently I came across couple of video posts by Vineet Nayar. His thoughts on this subject are inspiring, you may want to have a look. Renata “zones of uncertainty” http://www.vineetnayar.com/zones-of-uncertainty/ and “think positive” http://www.vineetnayar.com/think-positive/
May 4th, 2010 at 1:15 am
Thanks, Renata. I will take a look. I appreciate you stopping by and commenting.