THE ONLY REAL MISTAKE

It is 4 am and here I sit. It has been raining and my big ferocious rottie is afraid of the thunder. I can't go back to sleep because my mind will not let me so...... here I sit. Up at 4 am is unusual for me but there seems to be a lot of things going on in my life that are "unusual" for me and perhaps that is one of the reasons why I am writing this blog. "waking up" as it were and every pun intended!

Have you ever NOT done something because you were afraid of making a "mistake", afraid of "not doing it right", afraid of "failure"? Let me tell you, up until about the year 2000 that is the way I lived my life and if I am not careful I have the tendency to slide back onto that dead end road. I have come to realize that the only real mistake........ is not learning from your mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. I mean face it, that is how we learn. When I was a little boy I can remember my father telling me "you're alright, keep trying". But somewhere along the line I became afraid of making mistakes, not doing it right or failure..... whatever you want to call it. At some point in my life it became more important to not fail then to try and at that point I stopped learning, growing as a human being. The importance shifted from "you're alright, keep trying", to don't do that you might mess up. It took a "big mistake" to help me realize that, OK it did hurt but it didn't kill me and the most important thing, what are the lessons I can learn from this.

We are the sum of all our experiences! Do you realize that? There is no such thing as "shudda, wudda, coulda"! The phrases, "if only", "what if", if I had just", or the all important "I wish I had", should not be in your vocabulary. You can't go back and change the past, there is no promise of tomorrow, all you have is today, so get over it, suck it up and move on! Our mistakes do more to shape who we are than our accomplishments. Let me repeat that, our mistakes do more to shape us than our accomplishments. The only real mistake is not learning from your mistakes.

History always seems to keep repeating itself. Why is that? Because man never learns from his mistakes. Hey what do you say, let's go around that mountain one more time. Do you know people like that? Are you one of those people? We are destined to keep making the same mistakes if we don't learn from them. "I have been married 5 times"!! said with a strange sense of pride like you are going to get an award. "I always pick the wrong person"...HELLO... WAKE UP!!!!!!!!!! LEARN, LEARN, LEARN !!! Or how about, "why do I always keep doing that"? How many time have you heard or said that one? Can you smell the coffee yet? :)

Most people just go through life making the same mistakes over and over again, complain about how their lives suck, and live in the past of some "glory day" of their life. Why? Because somewhere in their lives the "mistake" became bigger than the "lesson". I can still hear my father say, "Thomas do something, even if it's wrong, do something". It is far better to do something, even if you don't succeed, than to not do anything at all.

Wake up people and smell the coffee!