Why Mistakes Are Good

So, let me start from the beginning. As we grow up we are told that making mistakes is bad right? I mean that's how they always taught me growing up, I've heard it from teachers, coaches, family members and that naturally led to me hating making mistakes.

I've made a lot of mistakes, most of them embarrassing but I stopped beating myself up over them when I learned these 3 things/quotes;

You learn from mistakes, not from successes. 

Go back in time and remember the moments in your life where you learned something, maybe your parents corrected you or you learned a life lesson, I can almost guarantee that that lesson came after you doing something wrong. Then do the contrary, go back to when you had a successful moment, what did you learn from it? The chances are you most probably learned nothing. Now don't get me wrong having something work out or go your way feels great and it's ultimately what we strive for, but understand that to eventually get there we must make miskates along the way. Take mistakes as stepping stones to eventually get whatever it is that you want.

You learn through negative feedback. 

Let's take the example of an interceptor missile, if its going the right way it keeps doing what it's doing but if it goes off course it corrects itself, that's what we should do. Many of us moan, complain or just give up after making a mistake, no, we should correct our path and keep moving. If you always get it right then you are not challenging yourself and that is a very slow death. If you make mistakes it's a sign that you're trying, that you're doing something. The guy who never made a mistake never did anything. You know Colonel Sanders? The guy who started the KFC franchise? Yeah, his idea was rejected 1009 times before he got his chance and untimately his breakthrough. Make progress with every time you make a mistake.

It's only a mistake if you miss the opportunity to take something from it.

So, one day I was walking back home from training disappointed cause I didn't play well and I was thinking, then the quote 'It's only a mistake if you miss the opportunity to take something from it' popped into my head and it's absolutely true, it's genius (If I don't say so myself), we're meant to use mistakes as building blocks not as obstacles, it's only bad if we don't learn anything, if we learn something than was it really a mistake? 

I have a saying, 'I either win or I win'. Let me explain. It originally stemmed from the quote 'You either win or you learn' and then after some thinking I said to myself 'If I win I win, but if I learn then that's also a win, so if I always learn and progress then I can't lose'. Like that I make whatever situation serve me as a win. The only way I can lose is if I dwell on about a mistake and never actually analyse it and what went wrong, fortunately I haven't really done that recently.

So what should we do?

We will make mistakes, we're only human, we're not perfect. But with every mistake we make we should learn something, understand that there's nothing wrong with making a mistake, but you made a mistake cause you did something wrong, and if you look hard enough you will find out what was done wrong. Don't get sad or lose confidence, gain something from the mistake, you gained experience from making it so next time you'll do a better job.