Whenever you try something new, mistakes are bound to happen.
It’s not the end of the world.
Once you realize you’ve made a mistake, what do you do? First, what you don’t do is overreact. Beating yourself up won’t help you and it rarely makes others excuse you, or feel sorry for you. Paul Schoemaker, the research director for the Mack Center for Technological Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School says that most people focus too much on their mistakes. They let their frustration and embarrassment overwhelm them and can’t see what they’ve done right. Worse, they allow their emotions to overpower their ability to see what to do to fix the error, and what they can learn from it. We also tend to blame ourselves for things we can’t help. Failing to finish the final edit on a report because your child was sick isn’t a mistake. It’s life.
So, what about real mistakes?
“Experience is the name everyone gives to his mistakes.” – Oscar Wilde
Wilde being Wilde, there is some sarcasm in this comment. However, there is also truth. We learn from experiences, both good and bad. Some things can help turn error into experience rather than a painful memory:
I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve tried to complete coursework or training, and either gave up or failed. It hasn’t stopped me yet. I hope you won’t let it stop you.
Diana Laufenberg on Learning from Mistakes:
I tend to agree. It’s easy to get frustrated but you can’t always succeed or achieve perfection. I spent my first two semesters of college with a steady 4.0, and I remember during my third semester I got a “B” because I got sick and went over a course’s absence policy which dropped me an entire grade. At first I was upset, but then I realized that these sorts of things happen — and this wasn’t my first disappointment nor would it be my last. Sure enough, I experienced many more troubles afterwards that made the lowering of my GPA seem pretty insignificant. With each problem, I learned not only how to avoid those troubles better, but also how to cope with them when they arose. It’s simply all part of the process. No one should expect a trouble-free college experience. It’s how you deal with it that matters.
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