LEARNING FROM YOUR MISTAKES

I’m leaving all philosophical questions about mistakes up to you. One person’s pleasure is another person’s mistake: decide for yourself. Maybe you enjoy stabbing your neighbor’s cat with a banana, who knows. We all do things we know are bad in the long term, but are oh so good in the short term. So regardless of where you stand, I’m working with you. However mistakes are defined in your personal philosophy this essay should help you learn from them.
Learning from mistakes that fall into the first two categories (Stupid & Simple) is easy, but shallow. Once you recognize the problem and know the better way, you should be able to avoid similar mistakes. Or in some cases you’ll realize that no matter what you do once in a while you’ll do stupid things (e.g. even Einstein stubbed his toes).
But these kinds of mistakes are not interesting. The lessons aren’t deep and it’s unlikely they lead you to learn much about yourself or anything else. For example compare these two mistakes

1. My use of dual part harmony for the 2nd trumpets in my orchestral composition for the homeless children’s shelter benefit concert overpowered the intended narrative of the violins.
2. I got an Oreo stuck in my underwear.

The kind of mistakes you make define you. The more interesting the mistakes, the more interesting the life. If your biggest mistakes are missing reruns of tv-shows or buying the wrong lottery ticket you’re not challenging yourself enough to earn more interesting mistakes.
And since there isn’t much to learn from simple and stupid mistakes, most people try to minimize their frequency and how much time we spend recovering from them. Their time is better spent learning from bigger mistakes. But if we habitually or compulsively make stupid mistakes, then what we really have is an involved mistake.
 Watch out for INVOLVED MISTAKES.
By: Scot Berkun

The four kinds of mistakes

One way to categorize mistakes is into these categories:

• Stupid: Absurdly dumb things that just happen. Stubbing your toe, dropping your pizza on your neighbor’s fat cat or poking yourself in the eye with a banana.
• Simple: Mistakes that are avoidable but your sequence of decisions made inevitable. Having the power go out in the middle of your party because you forgot to pay the rent, or running out of beer at said party because you didn’t anticipate the number of guests.
• Involved: Mistakes that are understood but require effort to prevent. Regularly arriving late to work/friends, eating fast food for lunch every day, or going bankrupt at your start-up company because of your complete ignorance of basic accounting.
• Complex: Mistakes that have complicated causes and no obvious way to avoid next time. Examples include making tough decisions that have bad results, relationships that fail, or other unpleasant or unsatisfying outcomes to important things.

HOW TO LEARN FROM YOUR MISTAKES

You can only learn from a mistake after you admit you’ve made it. As soon as you start blaming other people (or the universe itself) you distance yourself from any possible lesson. But if you courageously stand up and honestly say “This is my mistake and I am responsible” the possibilities for learning will move towards you. Admission of a mistake, even if only privately to yourself, makes learning possible by moving the focus away from blame assignment and towards understanding. Wise people admit their mistakes easily. They know progress accelerates when they do.
This advice runs counter to the cultural assumptions we have about mistakes and failure, namely that they are shameful things. We’re taught in school, in our families, or at work to feel guilty about failure and to do whatever we can to avoid mistakes. This sense of shame combined with the inevitability of setbacks when attempting difficult things explains why many people give up on their goals: they’re not prepared for the mistakes and failures they’ll face on their way to what they want. What’s missing in many people’s beliefs about success is the fact that the more challenging the goal, the more frequent and difficult setbacks will be. The larger your ambitions, the more dependent you will be on your ability to overcome and learn from your mistakes.
But for many reasons admitting mistakes is difficult. An implied value in many cultures is that our work represents us: if you fail a test, then you are a failure. If you make a mistake then you are a mistake (You may never have felt this way, but many people do. It explains the behavior of some of your high school or college friends). Like eggs, steak and other tasty things we are given letter grades (A, B, C, D and F) organizing us for someone else’s consumption: universities and employers evaluate young candidates on their grades, numbers based on scores from tests unforgiving to mistakes.
For anyone than never discovers a deeper self-identity, based not on lack of mistakes but on courage, compassionate intelligence, commitment and creativity, life is a scary place made safe only by never getting into trouble, never breaking rules and never taking the risks that their hearts tell them they need to take.
Learning from mistakes requires three things:

1. Putting yourself in situations where you can make interesting mistakes
2. Having the self-confidence to admit to them
3. Being courageous about making changes

NB : TO BE CONTINUED . WATCH OUT FOR THE NEXT ADVICE

FAKE FRIEND

She Slept With Her Snake And Then The Vet Told Her Something Shocking

This is a true story about a woman from India who lived in the Middle Ages and had a pet snake, python, which she loved so much. The snake was 4 meters long and looked healthy. However, one day her unusual pet just stopped eating.

This lack of appetite in the snake continued over a few weeks. The desperate woman tried everything she could and offered anything that a snake would like to strangle and eat. Nothing worked, and finally the woman took her loving pet to the veterinarian as a last resort.

The vet listened to the woman carefully and asked, ?Does your snake sleep with you at night, wrap around you closely and spread out throughout its length??

The woman was surprised and with a lot of hope she said, ?Yes! Yes! It does it every day and it makes me so sad because I see something asking of me, and I cannot help it feel better.?

Then, the vet said something shocking and most unexpected. ?Madam, your pet is not sick; it is just preparing to eat you.? Yes, the python wasn?t sick but it has been preparing to eat her instead!

?Every time, it is creeping and ?hugging? you, wrapping around your body, it is checking size to weigh how a great meal you are and how it must be prepared before the attack. And yes, it does not eat, in order to have enough space to digest you more easily,? the vet said.

This story comes with a moral ? Even people close to you, whom you are very affectionate with, can, have mean intentions. You need to identify the snake around you and their true intent. Hugs and kisses are not always honest.

Don?t fear the enemy that attacks you, but the fake friend that hugs you.

LAW OF LIFE

When a newspaper reporter interviewed a farmer who grew award-winning corn each year he entered his corn in the state fair, it was revealed that the farmer shared his seed corn with his neighbours.

Perplexed, the reporter asked, ?How can you afford to share your best seed corn with your neighbours when they are entering their corn in competition with yours each year??

The farmer smiled knowingly and explained, ?The wind picks up pollen from the ripening corn and swirls it from field to field. If my neighbours grow inferior corn, cross-pollination will steadily degrade the quality of my corn. If I am to grow good corn, I must help my neighbours grow good corn.?

So it is with our lives. Those who want to live meaningfully and well must help enrich the lives of others. For the value of a life, is measured by the lives it touches. And those who choose to be happy must help others find  happiness, for the welfare of each is bound up with the welfare of all. Call it power of collectivity. Call it a principle of success. Call it a law of life.

The fact remains, ?None of us truly wins, until we all win.? In life, when you help the people around you to be good, you surely become the best. Always bear in mind that "Real happiness is helping others.
live and let's live.
Good day !!!

The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by

default: by the moral failure of those who

evade the fact that there can be no

compromise on basic principles

.

SUCCESS STARTS FROM THE MIND

The power of can’t: The word ‘can’t’ makes strong people weak, blinds people who can see, saddens happy people, turns brave people into cowards, robs a genius of their brilliance, causes rich people to think poorly, and limits the achievements of that great person living inside us all.”