LEARNING FROM OUR MISTAKES

Someone once said, “If you are not making any mistakes, you are not trying hard enough”. Truth be known, I hate to make mistakes. I guess it’s the perfectionist or perhaps the over achiever in me.

Everyone makes mistakes. The bible is filled with stories of people’s mistakes. My grandfather used to say, “We should learn from the mistakes of others since there’s a good chance that we will not live long enough to make them all ourselves”.

I recently made an expensive [$278] mistake and got a speeding ticket. To make matters worse, it happened while only ten miles into a scheduled 350 mile car trip. I was upset with both myself and the [over achieving] police officer who informed me that I was going 74 mph in a 55 mph speed zone. For those of you who are familiar with I-285, the perimeter highway which encircles Atlanta, who goes 55 mph on 285?  If you did, you would get run over.

The famous author and motivational speaker Dale Carnegie, is said to have had a file folder in his desk drawer entitled "FTD".  It stood for “Foolish Things I Have Done". Whenever he did something foolish, he would dictate a record of it to his assistant. He confesses, however, that on occasion he was so embarrassed by his stupidity that he was ashamed to have her know it.  He would write it out in longhand and slip it into the file himself.

I just finished a book entitled, “How Do You Kill 11 Million People?”. As you may have guessed, the title refers to the approximate number of people who were killed at the hands of Adolf Hitler and his minions during the Holocaust period. The book asks its’ readers some important questions including how do we prevent a reoccurrence of such a horrendous event. As philosopher George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Like most things, learning from our mistakes as well as the mistakes of others is easier said than done, but we all know it’s the smart thing to do.