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Let’s be honest: making a mistake is painful. The ego is not a fan of mistakes. As creative, intelligent humans, we like to think of ourselves as competent, smart and – if we’re being very real – better at things than others. That’s why our instinct, when we make a mistake, is to remove ourselves from it as far and as quickly as possible, instead of looking for the life lessons to be learned. It’s like a bad smell we want to get rid of. But the truth is, if you’re willing to face the mistake and even break it down, it could be a gift.
Countless studies have found that there is one common characteristic of successful people: how they handle mistakes. Many of those studies are reviewed in detail in the book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (definitely worth a read if you’re feeling stuck). But the main point of the book is that there are two mindsets: the growth one and the fixed one.
Growth-minded individuals believe that, if they work at something, they have limitless potential to get good at it. Fixed mindset people believe that we’re all born with a permanent and unchangeable amount of aptitude for any given thing. It can’t be changed, even with work. The second group doesn’t like to learn from their mistakes. They see mistakes as “proof” that they’re untalented, unintelligent, unskilled…you get the idea…so why work at it? But growth mindset people see every mistake as a wealth of lessons and an opportunity to improve. If you’re ready to dive into the pain of past mess-ups, here are life lessons you can actually learn a lot from, and even be grateful for.
Burning A Bridge (Instead Of Just Walking Off It)
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When we’re young, we see things as black and white and can be stubbornly “principled.” Principled is in quotation marks because many people don’t even really know what their principles are until later in life – or don’t recognize how their actions don’t, in fact, line up with their principles. Burning a bridge is a great example of this. If you’re like a lot of people, you probably left your twenties with quite a few bridges in flames behind you. That’s because, when we’re young, we think it’s the “right thing to do” – completely obliterate a relationship that we find fault in.
Then what happened? You realized you needed a reference for a new job from that boss that you told off. Or you needed a reference for a landlord from that old roommate you cut out of your life. You discover that that colleague you said you “never wanted to see again,” is now the supervisor at your new company. As we age, we learn the world is smaller than we think, and burning bridges, though satisfying in the moment, usually bites us in the ass.
Lesson: A little diplomacy (aka biting that tongue/softening your language) goes a long way in the end. Many bridges we burn, it turns out, we need to cross again to get to future destinations.
