Learning From Our Mistakes

Patrick Dempsey, widely known as “McDreamy” on the television drama Grey’s Anatomy, said in an interview with Jeanne Wolf: “The more you can allow yourself to make mistakes, the better off you’re going to be. That’s what life is about. It’s good to have your ego burned.”

I am completely in agreement with Patrick on this one. It takes a certain amount of failing, of “having your ego burned” to allow you to develop the humility and perseverance that life often requires. It also provides the opportunity to learn a great deal about yourself. It would be very easy to become complacent if everything in life came too easily. People would begin to feel entitled to the good that comes their way, they would come to expect to get whatever they wanted whenever they wanted it. And when you get to that point you can find yourself facing some tough consequences. How do you develop an appreciation and understanding of what it means to work hard and the rewards, monetary and otherwise, that can come from that? What skills are you developing to handle the adversity that may come your way as you move through life? Everyone needs to get knocked down a peg or two from time to time lest we all get a little too big for our britches. It’s very simplistic to say that our economy is faltering (to put it mildly) because of many folks who became too big for their britches. If you walk through life with rose-colored glasses on all the time eventually it will catch up with you and not in a good way.

The young athlete who is always the all-star would benefit from being struck out or shown up on the court every now and again. This will help keep him/her grounded. Even if you’re the best at something, there is always someone there eager to knock you off your perch. Getting shown up once or twice is a good reminder that you need to continue work hard, that you can never assume that position at the top will always be yours.

The straight-A student who rarely cracks a book would greatly benefit from an average test grade. To be able to understand what it’s like to be ‘less than perfect’ is a reality-check that many need. Knowing how it feels to get back a “C” paper, knowing that you can have a bad day too sometimes provides that dose of reality that will keep you from assuming everything will always be easy for you, that you can’t always count on that A, you have to work for it.

When you make mistakes there is a tremendous opportunity to learn. For one, you learn what to avoid in order to not repeat the same mistake again. You also discover something about yourself. Maybe you realize a vulnerability that you didn’t know was there before. Maybe you had to work hard to overcome whatever that failure was proving to yourself how tough you really can be; or perhaps you had to go back to the drawing board and think things through a different way challenging your creativity or your intellect. You sometimes discover what’s most important to you through mistakes and what not to sweat. Out of mistakes comes the chance to grow, to improve, to learn. You might discover how much someone means to you or what you really want to be doing with your life or that you are stronger than you ever thought you were.

I think we all believe that cruising through life with no metaphoric traffic jams would be just great. But life is all about experiencing – learning, growing, loving, feeling, seeing, doing. It’s impossible to not trip along the way from time to time but from those missteps we learn how we are all alike in this world in one big way and that is that we’re human. We’re the same in so many ways, working towards the same goal – to live a life worth living, however we each may define that that means. Having our egos burned reminds us of our humanity and that we should never for a moment take for granted all the blessings in our lives. Don’t you agree?