NEVER Waste Your Mistakes

Ever had one of those days? You know. One of THOSE days where EVERYTHING seems to go wrong? I have….yesterday.

The day started nicely. I had planned to go to church, go home to get ready for my play rehearsal, and then be at rehearsal for 6 hours before coming home and going to bed.

Sounds simple, right?

Nope.

Because before I even entered the church, I clipped someone’s car pulling into a parking spot. Now, to some of you, this might not seem like such a big deal. But to me, who had never been in an accident involving another person before, it was a really embarrassing and scary situation. Cautiously, I got out of my car and sheepishly asked this lady if I had clipped her car. Seconds later, I was blindly rummaging through my glove compartment to find our insurance card (only to find out later that I had given her the wrong card…oops…good thing I gave her our contact info too!). I walked into church with tears of embarrassment in my eyes and a cloud of guilt over my head (even though the lady wasn’t mad at all).

Luckily, when I got home, my mom wasn’t mad and it turns out the “scratch” (on our car at least) rubbed off completely with a paper towel.

But that wasn’t the only thing that happened yesterday….

My mom had sent two crock pots full of chili for the cast to eat for dinner, so I asked someone to help me bring the empty pots back to my car at the end of the night. Unfortunately, I dropped the crock pot I was carrying onto the street while trying to open the car door. My heart sank when I knelt down to examine it and found it broken. Great.

Well, a lot of people would probably feel like a failure. And I did. I felt so destructive and guilty.

But when I came home and told my mom, she was very understanding. She did not blame me or yell at me at all. She even helped me out of my frustrating mood! She told me, “At least you’re doing SOMETHING.

“A lot of people sit around all day doing nothing, and they don’t mess up anything either! But wouldn’t you rather be participating in things and accomplishing things and run the risk of messing things up, or sitting around doing nothing wrong, and nothing worthwhile either?”

And she’s right.

If you’re scared of working hard or doing something of significance because you think you might mess up and make mistakes, you won’t accomplish anything worth telling about.

To accomplish great things, you have to make mistakes. Period. You have to be willing to mess up.

But that’s not all.

You can’t just develop a fearless attitude and get reckless. This can hurt other people as well as yourself. What you need to do is be bold, don’t be afraid to take risks, but then LEARN FROM YOUR MISTAKES!

Never waste a good mistake!

What does that mean?

Figure out what went wrong, learn from it, and make adjustments to do better the next time. The accident I had in the church parking lot should make me a better driver – more alert, more defensive. If it doesn’t, I wasted that experience. The same thing goes for every time something goes wrong in life.

Like New York Times best selling author and leadership expert Orrin Woodward says:

I haven’t failed 100 times…I just found out 100 ways that it doesn’t work.

Don’t be afraid to fall, and when (not if) you do…

Don’t waste it.