29th Mar, 2022
“Forget regret,
Or life is yours to miss,
No other road,
No other way,
No day but today.” ~Jonathan Larson
It’s important to remember that everyone makes mistakes, and that everyone who makes mistakes has regrets.
When you make a mistake, don’t regret and call yourself ‘stupid’.
You are not stupid. You are just human!
Failures are the stepping stones to success. Without failure, we’ll never learn how to succeed, try to fail, instead of trying to avoid failure through fear.
‘Son, I have learned a lot of life lessons just seeing you guys grow up. Like when you were a toddler and trying to take your first steps and how you repeatedly fell down, yet got up and tried again and again and again.
Sometimes you laughed, sometimes you cried and at other times, you did both at the same time. But you kept trying and trying, laughing and crying. This was repeated several times in your acts while growing up, learning to speak, write, read, ride a bicycle and while playing tennis with friends.
Son, We did not label your experience as a “failure”.
We all just enjoyed your childhood.’
Unlike us adults, babies don’t know the possibility of a failure, so they happily keep falling down until one day they take a few steps, and then a few more.
Before long, they’re jumping and running. All their trying pays off. They fall but never fail.
As grown-ups, what if we also simply choose not to fail?
I always remember something my mentor used to say, “The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.”
The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.
Treat your mistakes as a part of the learning process.
Life is a little easier if you expect a certain percentage of it to go wrong no matter how hard you try.
A smart man makes a mistake, learns from it, and never makes that mistake again.
But a wise man finds a smart man and learns from him how to avoid the mistake altogether.
Fall but never fail, learn from your mistakes and stay blessed forever.
(An excerpt from my book, ‘Dear Son..Life Lessons from a father’)