What's missing in many people's beliefs about success?

“Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi

“If people refuse to look at you in a new light and they can only see you for what you were, only see you for the mistakes you've made, if they don't realize that you are not your mistakes, then they have to go.” ~ Steve Maraboli

“It's never easy to admit you've made a mistake, but it's a crucial step in learning, growing, and improving yourself. You have to examine, among other things, how to learn from your mistakes. You can only learn from a mistake after


you admit you've made it. As soon as you start blaming other people (or the universe itself), you distance yourself from any possible lesson. But if you courageously stand up and honestly say "This is my mistake and I am responsible" the possibilities for learning will move towards you. Admission of a mistake, even if only privately to yourself, makes learning possible by moving the focus away from blame assignment and towards understanding. Wise people admit their mistakes easily. They know progress accelerates when they do.

This advice runs counter to the cultural assumptions we have about mistakes and failure, namely that they are shameful things. We're taught in school, in our families, or at work to feel guilty about failure and to do whatever we can to avoid mistakes. This sense of shame combined with the inevitability of setbacks when attempting difficult things explains why many people give up on their goals: they're not prepared for the mistakes and failures they'll face on their way to what they want. What's missing in many people's beliefs about success is the fact that the more challenging the goal, the more frequent and difficult setbacks will be. The larger your ambitions, the more dependent you will be on your ability to overcome and learn from your mistakes.

But for many reasons admitting mistakes is difficult. An implied value in many cultures is that our work represents us: if you fail a test, then you are a failure. If you make a mistake then you are a mistake (You may never have felt this way, but many people do. It explains the behavior of some of your high school or college friends). Like eggs, steak and other tasty things we are given letter grades (A, B, C, D and F) organizing us for someone else's consumption: universities and employers evaluate young candidates on their grades, numbers based on scores from tests unforgiving to mistakes.

For anyone who never discovers a deeper self-identity, based not on lack of mistakes but on courage, compassionate intelligence, commitment and creativity, life is a scary place made safe only by never getting into trouble, never breaking rules and never taking the risks that their hearts tell them they need to take.
Learning from mistakes requires three things:
1. Putting yourself in situations where you can make interesting mistakes
2. Having the self-confidence to admit to them
3. Being courageous about making changes

Difficultly with change involves acceptance of mistakes. Some feel that to agree to change means there is something wrong with them. "If I'm perfect, why would I need to change?" Since they need to protect their idea of perfection, they refuse change (Or possibly, even refuse to admit they did anything wrong).

But this is a trap: refusing to acknowledge mistakes, or tendencies to make similar kinds of mistakes, is a refusal to acknowledge reality. If you can't see the gaps, flaws, or weaknesses in your behavior you're forever trapped in the same behavior and limitations you've always had, possibly since you were a child (When someone tells you you're being a baby, they might be right).

Another challenge to change is that it may require renewing commitments you've broken before, from the trivial "Yes, I'll try to remember to take the trash out" to the more serious "I'll try to stop sleeping with all of your friends". This happens in any environment: the workplace, friendships, romantic relationships or even commitments you've made to yourself. Renewing commitments can be tough since it requires not only admitting to the recent mistake, but acknowledging similar mistakes you've made before. The feelings of failure and guilt become so large that we don't have the courage to try again.

This is why success in learning from mistakes often requires involvement from other people, either for advice, training or simply to keep you honest. A supportive friend's, mentor's or professional's perspective on your behavior will be more objective than your own and help you identify when you're hedging, breaking or denying the commitments you've made. No amount of analysis can replace your confidence in yourself. When you've made a mistake, especially a visible one that impacts other people, it's natural to question your ability to perform next time. But you must get past your doubts. The best you can do is study the past, practice for the situations you expect, and get back in the game. Your studying of the past should help broaden your perspective. You want to be aware of how many other smart, capable well meaning people have made similar mistakes to the one you made, and went on to even bigger mistakes, I mean successes, in the future.

One way to know you've reached a healthy place is your sense of humor. It might take a few days, but eventually you'll see some comedy in what happened. When friends tell stories of their mistakes it makes you laugh, right? Well when you can laugh at your own mistakes you know you've accepted it and no longer judge yourself on the basis of one single event. Reaching this kind of perspective is very important in avoiding future mistakes. Humor loosens up your psychology and prevents you from obsessing about the past. It's easy to make new mistakes by spending too much energy protecting against the previous ones. Remember the saying "a man fears the tiger that bit him last, instead of the tiger that will bite him next".

So the most important lesson in all of mistake making is to trust that while mistakes are inevitable, if you can learn from the current one, you'll also be able to learn from future ones. No matter when happens tomorrow you'll be able to get value from it, and apply it to the day after that. Progress won't be a straight line but if you keep learning you will have more successes than failures, and the mistakes you make along the way will help you get to where you want to go.
1. Accepting responsibility makes learning possible.
2. Don't equate making mistakes with being a mistake.
3. You can't change mistakes, but you can choose how to respond to them.
4. Growth starts when you can see room for improvement.
5. Work to understand why it happened and what the factors were.
6. What information could have avoided the mistake?
7. What small mistakes, in sequence, contributed to the bigger mistake?
8. Are there alternatives you should have considered but did not?
9. What kinds of changes are required to avoid making this mistake again?What kinds of change are difficult for you?
10. How do you think your behavior should/would change in you were in a similar situation again?
11. Work to understand the mistake until you can make fun of it (or not want to kill others that make fun).
12. Don't over-compensate: the next situation won't be the same as the last.
When we’re comfortable with making mistakes, we’re more likely to take risks and tackle projects.

Always remember, my dear friends that celebrating mistakes is not the same as setting out to make them. Celebrating mistakes involves wisdom; setting out to make them involves willful incompetence. Effective people don’t set goals with the idea of making mistakes. Instead, they aim to reach those goals while accepting the risk of error. Of course there is one sure way to avoid making mistakes, and that’s to avoid life……….And that is what you should actually not avoid for our mistakes can be the most powerful teachers we have.”