From null program:
This week I made a mistake that ultimately enlightened me about …
A better opening to a post or journal entry I cannot imagine.
We all make mistakes. How many mistakes do we see & use as an opportunity?
I often reflect back on a quote from Frank Herbert's Dune [US] [JP] (emphasis mine):
… his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult … every experience carries its lesson.
The entire Scientific Method is predicated on the idea of making mistakes and learning from them.
Example: I let myself get sucked into something this morning that looked like a footstool requiring my deep attention and action. By the end of the day the footstool turned out to be one foot of an elephant that required nothing more of me than a reassuring pat. Complaining, which hadn't seriously entered my mind until writing this post, would be useless to the elephant and to me.
I learned a lot about the elephant in a very short amount of time. When I was spun up trying to tend to the footstool I was interacting with people I didn't usually communicate. I received an intense education in something I used to know well but with which I didn't stay current. I saw how some new people, now in my orbit, work and got an insight into their thinking. These are skilled, talented people I will do well to know better. And I got to work with a few folks I know, enjoy working with, and didn't know were in town.
I thought about what I should do when I get a similar request, which happens frequently enough that I should have a process for when it occurs yet happens infrequently enough that I easily pushed down in my priority list.
Meanwhile, I made at least a dozen or more other mistakes in the same 12 hours. I hope to address them, the ones over which I have control, Real Soon Now.
One has only so many hours in the day to make mistakes and learn from them.