Answer:
Making mistakes is an important learning opportunity. Learning is enhanced by error, whether it involves doing homework, making friends, or participating in sports. Students learn persistence when developing new skills, along with how to build resiliency to failure when they make mistakes and correct them.
A mistake is an action by us, that gets either other people or us into some sort of trouble. Mistakes can be careless or accidental, gigantic like losing one’s life savings in an investment or tiny like spilling juice over a school essay. One thing is for certain though: mistakes are always opportunities for learning, provided we tackle them with that perspective. Making mistakes helps you to realize what you did wrong in the situation that you were in, what you learnt from it and how to react to such situations in the future. We can’t always control the situations or circumstances that we find ourselves in, but the choice of how we will respond to these situations, is always ours to make. We keep improving our response skills by learning from previous experiences that went wrong.If you don’t make mistakes early on in life and do everything perfectly, which is virtually impossible anyway, you will eventually pay the price for it later on. This is because you don’t know how to avoid making the mistake that you didn’t make when the stakes weren’t very high. This doesn’t mean that we should keep trying to make mistakes. When we do though, we should not be afraid to keep our heads held high and carry on. We shouldn’t forget what we erred in but should not have it continuously preying on our minds either, keeping us so preoccupied that we can’t get on productively with our lives. Steve Jobs said, “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.” Steve Jobs himself must have made a few mistakes while working on his Apple computers but he simply understood what went wrong and carried on improving his innovations. This is why Apple is where it is today, not only because Steve Jobs was brilliant but also because he was not afraid to take risks and sometimes make mistakes and learn from them.
However, it is not at all easy to learn from our mistakes. Some conditions need to be met for us to be able to actually become wiser after the mistake. If these conditions are not met, we are quite likely to learn nothing and remain just as ignorant as we were before the mistake was made.
Firstly, it is important to keep a positive mindset and be open to discussing what you did wrong, with someone whom you trust and whom you know has your best interests at heart. Being open-minded is a great way to begin to understand your mistakes.
Secondly, you must also think about the alternative that you could have pursued. Then you can remind yourself to follow this alternative correct course of action when you next run into a similar problem. This is vital if you want to learn from your mistakes because otherwise, you might repeat the same one next time. Sometimes thinking of an alternative can be quite hard, so that would also be an ideal time for you to talk to someone else who can help you. This could be someone who has gone through a similar experience before you and has his or her learning to share with you.
Thirdly, if others were affected by the mistake you made, it would be best to apologize to them and tell them that you will never repeat the error. If they do not accept your apology, you have to try extra hard to convince them to forgive you or wait for the whole issue to blow over. Bruce Lee said, “Mistakes are always forgivable if one has the courage to admit them.” When one person has the courage to ask for forgiveness and when the other person has the even greater courage to forgive, both people can grow from the experience.
Lastly, making mistakes can sometimes be very hard to forget particularly when it has a big impact on our lives. We must realize that we are all human; all of us make mistakes, so we aren’t the only ones in deep waters. It is also good to remember that no matter how terrible you think your life is because of the mistake you made, there will always be people even worse off than you and they would give anything to be in your shoes. So it’s helpful to remind ourselves how fortunate we are.
So many great people in history have learnt from their mistakes. For example, Thomas Edison did not make the light bulb overnight. He spent months developing that idea of his, using platinum and other metal filaments until he found a special type of carbon filament that kept a light bulb working for 13.5 hours. Edison persevered for months (despite making mistakes) and look where that got him! His famous quote – “Success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration,” makes complete sense because it shows how hard he worked to make something that is so integral to our lives today.