The Importance of Mistakes

How many successful piano players can say they never made a mistake? Of course it would be ridiculous to assume that they were born with perfect piano fingers and that their minds already knew which keys to strike and when. Mistakes were an important part of every musician's learning process. Without them, we wouldn't have the astonishing successes in the music world.

The same ideology applies to every walk of life. Some mistakes are necessary in order to achieve correctness. The important thing is that we recognize mistakes for what they are. Don't dwell on them or think on them incessantly--recognize that you have found one way not to do something, and continue trying to find another way. If you stay stuck in a puddle of self-castigation for your errors, you will never succeed. Too many try this, and too many bog down in the slough of despond, so to speak. Once we realize that our mistakes were not only necessary but productive, we will begin to see the whole pattern of order in our lives.

Misplaced keys?  Can't find the owner's manual?  Lost a toy?  Not to worry.  Retrace your steps since the time you remember last seeing what you're looking for.  If that doesn't yield results, try the process of elimination.  Get a checklist.  List all the places you've looked so you don't waste time searching the same places more than once.  Every place where it isn't helps you find out where it is, which is another example of how mistakes can be useful.

Every artist must first scribble.  The blocky and disproportionate drawings of our youth and inexperience soon begin to take on a smoother and more realistic shape, but only under one condition: that we keep on trying.  Anyone who quits never gets any better.  Anyone who keeps thinking about failure will not press on into success.  Success is measured by how badly you want it, and by how many times you try again.  It will not come to those who merely wait for it.  It must be pursued with all your strength of mind and all your will.  Anything less and success will elude you.

Did you accidentally insult the governor's wife?  Did you mistakenly irritate your boss?  Did you let someone untrustworthy in on your personal info?  These and other social mistakes smart painfully, but there is good news: you will never make that particular mistake again.  Social etiquette is a discipline that takes time and experience to learn.  In the meantime, don't keep berating yourself for your foibles and faux pas.  Without trying to interact, you would not learn what to do by learning what not to do.  It's a normal part of life.  The older you are and the more you interact, the better you will become at it.

Those who never learn will be those who are "shy" and remain in the corner as a wallflower or a human coatrack.  Social phobia supposedly protects us from getting hurt, but what it really does is starve us for fresh information.  We become stagnated when we don't interact, which is as equally unhealthy (and maybe even more so) than being hurt or committing an error.

There is a time for discernment.  Like the hornet repeatedly hitting a wall instead of going around it, trying again must be surmounted with discretion and moderation.  We must use our analytical minds to calculate where the mistake is, what it is, why it is a mistake, and what we can do to correct it or redo something correctly.  Given time and determination, anything can be undertaken and done.  Well, not anything.  Human beings learned to fly, but only by following the rules of aerodynamics.  We made numerous attempts before coming up with the winning equation.  But what would have happened if our forerunners of aviation had given up?  If not for those funny looking contraptions that didn't work, how would we know what to try next?  How would we know what did work after all, if we had quit trying with one or two failures, or if we had listened to those negative voices telling us that we were never meant to fly?