Mistakes

Is there any worse feeling than when you realize you’ve made a mistake? When we’re young, we’re taught to own up to our mistakes, that “honesty is the best policy”. When we become adults with jobs, we immediately go into crisis mode: Am I 100% sure this is my error? What mitigating circumstances can I think of to explain why this happened? We frantically search through our email to find something in writing that will cover our hiney. We are told never to use the word “sorry” in an email, but instead to “regret the unfortunate oversight”. When this recently happened to me, I was reminded of this page from an old Real Simple Magazine I kept: We tend to dwell on the 10% of the time we err and forget the 90% of the time we’re doing well and getting things done.

Remember: you may not be a kid anymore, but you’re still human.