BORROWED FROM EXITER

I BORROWED THIS FROM EXITER BECAUSE I THOUGHT IT WAS A VERY THOUGHTFUL ENTRY AND VERY WORTHWHILE. SO ALL OF THIS IS HIS!

I play a lot of chess.  It’s a beautiful game where both sides start out equally, with the winner being decided often by who makes the first mistake.  

I lose a lot of the games that I play.  A LOT of the games.  And you know what, I’m okay with that, for two reasons: (1) the only thing I ‘lost’ was a game of chess, and (2) in all honesty, you learn more from losing than you do from winning.

When you win, you think you did everything the best you possibly colud.  You don’t think you need to change your game plan, your mentality, or what you ate the day before.  But when you lose, you know that something went off kilter somewhere, and it’s up to you to find out where you went wrong so it doesn’t happen again.

In other words, when you lose, you probably made a mistake.

So what?

Once more for emphasis.

So what?

We have to make a lot of decisions in our lives.  And one of the biggest paralyzing fears is that we’re going to make a mistake.  To which I say, why does that matter?  First of all, you won’t know it’s a mistake till long after it’s even relevant.  Second, what seems like a mistake now could turn out to have been a great idea, and vice versa.  And third, what’s the worst that could possibly happen?

Somewhere along our twisted educations, we were told that making mistakes is a Very Bad Thing.  We spend most of our lives in fear of making mistakes, from picking the wrong outfit to wear, turning down the wrong exit, dating the wrong guy.  But are they really mistakes?

I’ve spent enough money on video games in the past 15 years to have bought a really nice car.  But instead of saving for a car, I bought hundreds of video games, spent countless hours playing World of Warcraft, paid thousands of dollars for Magic: The Gathering cards (which I eventually gave away), and done a lot of outrageous things in the name of getting to play just a little bit more Nintendo.

If I had a car, it would mean paying thousands a year for maintenance.  I’d stress every time I got a ding on the windshield, I’d stress every time a payment was due, I’d have to work more just to pay for the darn thing, all so I could feel ‘free’ and be able to go anywhere I wanted to.

Instead, I learned how to be social, how to break the ice with total strangers, how to use parts of my brain I wouldn’t have used otherwise.  I learned about how to take advantage of rules and how to creatively expolit situations.  I increased my vocabulary.  I’ve met people from all over the world.  I know how to fix basic computer problems. 

So was it really a ‘mistake’?  

If you do find yourself in the rare occasion where a ‘mistake’ was made, why dwell on it?  Why think about stuff like, "If I could do it all over again, I would have sunk more of my income into passive assets instead of working so hard to help the owners of the company I work for 20 times more money than they paid me"?  You’re aware now, and that’s extremely valuable.  Learning is one of the most expensive things to do.

I know this because I made the ‘mistake’ of ‘dating’ Jennifer Obeney for 17 hours my sophomore year of high school.  I made the ‘mistake’ of falling for her, of spending eight bucks on a bouquet of carnations (when you’re 15, eight bucks is a lot of money) to give to her before her dance recital, only to have her tell me that she really didn’t want to date me.  This one little snafu traumatized me into never giving flowers to any other girl, never displaying affection or even interest, and being a cold, emotionless shell of a human that you see typing before you.

Ok, that’s not true.  I shrugged it off, told her to keep the carnations anyway (she was the hit of the dressing room, let me tell you), and moved on.  I haven’t thought about this little incident for 15 years, until I tried to think of something in my past that could have been considered a ‘mistake’ to use as an example for this entry.  This was the best I could come up with.

So here’s my challenge to you.  Make a mistake.  Seriously.  Intentionally make a mistake.  Wear mismatched socks.  Spell a word in the name of your next entry wrong.  Take the wrong exit on the highway.  Forget to water the fuchsia.  And see if it even really mattered.

And when you’re comfortable with the fact that making little mistakes don’t matter, the next step is to stop fretting when you do make them by accident.  Really, it’s no big deal.

To prove my point, their are three spelling and grammar mistakes in this entry, not counting the title (did you even notice?).  How much do you think I was bothered to go back and fix them, knowing full well you probably didn’t notice them in the first place?