Hello everyone, and Happy Friday! I hope your week has been great!
Today's Fortune Cookie was sent in by a reader, and it's so great:
Mistakes show us what we need to learn.
How true is that?
I think a lot of us fear making a mistake, thinking that it shows we are incompetent, unintelligent, or incapable of learning.
But there is no shame in them! Mistakes can have their value, too.
Take, for instance, learning to ride a bike. Did you consider every time you wobbled or fell over to be a mistake? Were you ashamed by that? Why? You're LEARNING! How else are you going to figure out how to ride if you don't keep trying—and failing—until you eventually get it?
Maybe you're a distance cycler now, or compete in races, or perhaps you just enjoy riding to work and back. You wouldn't have learned how to ride that bike without falling off a few times.
Here's another example: I'm a pretty accomplished knitter, but do you know how many times I failed at knitting, making seemingly insurmountable mistakes and feeling like I'd never get there? My husband likes to joke about how many times needles and yarn would sail across the room in my fits of frustration—but I always picked them back up again, learned from my mistakes, and mastered it. I now know what to do when I drop a stitch, how to go back and fix an error, and create beautiful garments without sweating it. I wouldn't have been able to do that without making the errors or dropping the stitches in the first place.
And then there are the many inventions that were actually the result of mistakes. How many people have pacemakers that are saving their lives? How many of you have heated up leftovers in a microwave? Did you know that these items were created due to mistakes made by their inventors? I didn't, until now!
So here's my takeaway from all of this: stop being so hard on yourself. Next time you make a mistake, use the pain point as a learning point. Put aside shame and embarrassment; there's no point in dwelling. Learn from it, instead! You can also ask yourself if the mistake has value in and of itself—you never know, you could have just invented the next big thing!
I hope this fortune was insightful for you. I'd love to read your thoughts on it! Leave me a comment below and tell me a mistake that had value to you: what you learned from it, or if it led to a new discovery in your life.
Until next time, b.e.e. peeps... 🐝🌹
