This week’s guest post is from the fabulous Enid of Enid Bite’Em, the blog about reading, ranting and roller derbying.
Enid’s blog is always guaranteed to get me thinking, nodding along, fired up, or laughing. Or all four at once.
So I was of course elated when she agreed to write a guest post, leaving me free to relax on my bubby bloggy break. Yes, relax with a newborn and a toddler. I am nothing if not an optimist.
Thanks, Enid! And take it away…
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Mistakes
Then she had a little coronary because she was used to a teenage rather than an adult audience and could not narrow down what everybody should learn to one key thing.
Then she got over herself and realised life is short and she should just get on with it.
So today’s topic is:
Mistakes.
I wish everybody would make more of them.
Has anybody seen the Harvard graduation day speech by JK Rowling (where she talks to them about FAILURE?).
At first it seems that she may have forgotten who she was talking to, but of course because she is the great JK you soon realise she has not. Her point is that everyone, at some point or another (even Harvard graduates and millionaire novelists) are ‘failures’.
Without failure, NO ONE WOULD EVER BE ANYTHING, EVER.
The BEAUTY of making mistakes is that you IMPROVE.
Mistakes make you better.
Mistakes show you just one more way of not doing something so that you may find the right way.
If you never make a mistake, you would be showing that you have NEVER LEARNT ANYTHING.
It’s why Olympic medallists take more falls in training than their non-medal winning competitors, why some people are always lucky (despite not getting everything they aim for) and why most people generally think school is a good idea.
Fear of failure stops you from becoming anything at all.
And who wants to be an unevolved blob? (Editor’s note: there is every chance that I will currently be feeling like an unevolved blob.)
So, for the sake of humanity – please go and make some mistakes today (and stop beating yourself up for all the mistakes you have made in the past).
Skate or die!!,
Enid
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Enid Bite’Em is a reading, rearing, roller-derbying blogger who thinks the world would be a better place if people made more mistakes.
For more from Enid, visit her blog at Enid Bite’Em, or her facebook page.
What mistake have you made recently? What did you learn from it?
Last night, in the still of the night, I made the mistake of stepping on the CREAK!!y board outside Miss6’s bedroom. She woke from a bad dream and yelled for me saying the house she was in broke and fell down with a large crack. We lost some time in resettling.
NOW I have to remember the creaky board in the middle of the night. So when I hop over it in the dark, I’d better make sure my graceful landing isn’t any worse than that! 😛 I was listening, really 🙂 #teamIBOT
I hope you have a better night tonight, Twitchy … we have a ‘creaky board hotspot’ in our house … right beside the baby’s cot of course 🙂
Sometimes, I feel like all I do is make mistakes, and i didn’t think of that as being even slightly successful.
Thank you for this xx
No worries Jess – it was all for a reason!
Emily, I hope you’re well, and still feeling optimistic, and thank you so much for the kind introduction … in regards to mistakes … I’ve just found a few errors in this post! Oh well, I will learn!
Author Neil Gaiman is very positive about mistakes. I like his quote, delivered to a graduating university class: “Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes, break rules, make the world more interesting for your being here. Make good art.”
I hadn’t heard that before … what a great quote :). Kind of Dr. Seuss-ish, about mistakes. “Think left and think right and think low and think high, or the thinks you can think if only you try.” 🙂
Great post, Enid! I speak Japanese and Indonesian and I reckon to get to levels of fluency, it’s about making mistakes. All the time.