THE TRUTH ABOUT MISTAKES
26 OCTOBER 2021 (14 MIN READ)
Think about the times where you have learned the biggest life lessons. The ones that punched you dead in the fucking mouth and forced you to change. Odds are that they came in the form of a mistake, which you may still feel some shame for till this day. But why should we feel this shame? And why do we often fear making mistakes? There’s not much evidentiary basis because the moments in life where we make the most change, and learn the most about ourselves, are when we really fuck up. Following this logical sequence, does it make sense to argue that those who are willing to make more mistakes will grow more as a person? In short, yes and no. Having no fear of consequences could lead you into psychopath territory—having a rational understanding of consequences is the sweet spot.
To illustrate this rationality, let’s picture a young man in a coffee shop who notices an attractive woman reading his favorite book. While his gut may be saying, “No fucking way you go up to her,” and continues to list a billion reasons why he should not—none of that is based in rationality. If he is polite and charming, in the absolute worst case, she tells him she’s focusing on her book, or she quickly shows disinterest. To the ego, this seems like the end of the world, but in reality, it’s not a big deal at all. A rationalist, when it comes to consequences, would be ok with the worst-case scenario but not expect it. In this case, they would say, “She may turn me away, but the upside is better than that.” And if the worst case happens, they will learn their lesson and apply it to the next situation. So, by taking a rational risk and accepting a potential mistake will be made, there are only two positives. Either taking the chance gets you what you want or you learn from the mistake and become a stronger version of yourself. On the flip side, the consequence of a mistake can be too strong at times, making it rational to not take the chance. For instance, if the woman in the book shop was dealing with her crying baby while in the middle of an intense phone call, approaching her in that instance would just make you seem like an inconsiderate asshole. Allow your emotions to subside with rationality to help you calculate whether the mistake will be worth it.
To show you the power of mistakes in my own life, I’d like to bring you to Colossal Fuck Up #1. About two and a half years ago, at the height of my drug addiction and bipolar mania, I decided to make the most boneheaded move a guy could make: plagiarize a love letter. I had just suddenly broken up with a girl I cared for dearly, but it came as a shocking surprise, as I constantly love-bombed her throughout the relationship. To make myself feel better, I wrote a love letter explaining my decision and how much she will always mean to me. However, half of the letter came straight from the TV show, Californication. I thought I was so smart that she would automatically think they were my words. I couldn’t have been more wrong. To my shocking surprise, a couple months later, I found out she knew all along they were plagiarized words. And worst of all, that hurt her more than anything I had ever done. She felt like she did not deserve my real words. Knowing that broke me, but that’s a good thing. Although I do not defend what I did, and there are no excuses that justify its horrors, it taught me the most valuable lesson I have ever learned: be an honest man because only weak men hide behind lies. In that moment, choosing to send plagiarized words—I was weak, narcissistic, and a mere boy. Understanding that reality drove me to start the journey towards manhood and choosing honesty. If I had not done that truly fucked up thing, I would not be the man I am now. However, I did hurt someone in the process, and that’s something I will never forgive myself for.
On a less catastrophic scale, consider a second mistake I made that taught me about the process of seduction. As a naive freshman in college, I had been interested in a girl for quite a while, but not taken any action whatsoever. I chose to put her needs above mine and not say anything out of fear of rejection. I could always sense there was some level of flirtation and chemistry, but again, I was scared shitless of getting let down. It’s as if I was more into the scenarios in my head than I was with reality. One was full of hope and the other was fucking scary. Nevertheless, one day at a party, she outright expressed interest in me to my face. Rather than doing anything about it, I boasted about the encounter to all my friends and her friends, which resulted in the obvious: her losing all interest in me. I felt devastated and humiliated, but I learnt a very powerful lesson. To attract someone, especially someone who is highly sought after, you have to put an obstacle in front of yourself. In other words, make someone work for you and hold your cards close to your chest. If you immediately show you are easy and reveal your deep interest, the other person is likely to take you for granted and lose interest. Although I do write about being yourself in dating, at times, you have to incorporate some level of seduction in the initial stages of courtship. In today’s day and age, filled with romanticized movies and social media posts, people constantly live in fantasy. To some degree, we all are dying to experience that fantasy in reality and whoever brings it out of us will be desired. And by only indulging in your own fantasies, you are failing to incorporate the powerful fantasy of the other person, leading you to ultimately fail at attracting them. If I hadn’t made that boneheaded, juvenile mistake, I would not have discovered this powerful truth.
THE NECESSITY OF MISTAKES
“If you’re not scared, you’re not taking a chance. And if you’re not taking a chance, then what the hell are you doing?” - Ted Mosby, How I Met Your Mother
This section will argue that mistakes are necessary for two main reasons: to figure out what’s actually good for you in life and to succeed. And at the root of every mistake comes a chance. In sequence, if one takes a chance and it fails, you end up with a mistake. But since mistakes are required to figure yourself out and flourish, Ted Mosby’s harsh tone is justified: if you’re not allowing yourself to take a chance, then what the actual fuck are you doing? In short, you’re letting yourself get cozy under the seductive blanket of complacency and fear. This means that by not allowing yourself to take chances and face a potential mistake, you are accepting the current state you are in as permanent—leading to no growth, and as said in the last sentence, complacency. If you are still not convinced, consider why mistakes are necessary to figuring your shit out.
As you’ve probably noticed in my writing, I often use romantic metaphors to illustrate points. So, continuing with this trend in my area of expertise, consider a thirty-year-old woman who finally married the man of her dreams. To get to this person, she had to sort through a lot of rubbish, but more importantly, she needed to figure out who was right for her. And the only way she could have done that was by experiencing what was wrong for her. By dating her ex, Mike, she learned that she wants a man who makes her feel like a priority. Then, the following guy, Dave, made her feel like his #1 everything, but he often needed her validation, which she started to find unattractive. Next, William entered her life, full of confidence and a healthy prioritization of her, but he too often suppressed his emotions, which felt unhealthy for her. This pattern continued until she encountered Nick, where everything suddenly felt right, and all the issues that enraged her before no longer existed. Whatever negative attributes he possessed, she could easily tolerate—unlike anyone else before him. However, if she met Nick before making all those “mistakes” in dating, she would not have possessed the same level of admiration for him. In short, she figured out what she wanted in a man by allowing herself to fail over and over again. She took many chances until one finally paid off. This strategy and pattern is not exclusive to dating—it applies to every field of life. Finding your purpose follows the same sequence: trying a bunch of different things out and seeing what does not work for you, leading you to find what eventually does. Hell, even food works the same fucking way. As you grow up and expand your palate, you learn what you really like and what you don’t. And the foods that you tried and didn’t like came from a chance you took. After throwing up endlessly after eating blue cheese, I know I can never go back to having it again. (Some of you should see your exes in the same light).
We all have things we feel the need to try in life. And the longer we go without experiencing them, the more they ruminate in our minds and make us salivate while pondering their arrival. To me, this was alcohol for a long time. I went sober for about a year at twenty-one, which was necessary at the time to beat my drug addiction. But as time went by, I became much more disciplined and aware of my addictive patterns. Once I accepted that I was responsible again, the idea of casually drinking entered my mind. However, whenever the thought appeared, I would coat it in shame and push it away. After going through this pattern over and over again, I decided to stop giving alcohol so much power. So, I decided to have one beer with my family. And if I desired to keep drinking and go off the rails after that one beer, I would know it’s best that I never drink again. On the other hand, if I had that one beer and it didn’t really phase me, and if I had no desire to keep drinking, then I could start drinking casually in moderation. Once I conducted the experiment, I didn’t even like the effect and I had absolutely no desire to keep drinking. I also woke up the next morning feeling significantly worse than I normally would. After all of this, I decided I did not need alcohol in my life and it no longer controlled me, especially not my addiction. Now, I have a drink on special occasions, but each time, I feel exactly the same. Overall, by taking a risky chance, although calculated and rational, and trying something my mind would just not put to rest, I learnt a lot about myself. More importantly, that idealization lost power once I jumped into the fire. If you have things that you want to try in life that you keep mentally circling on, go for it—just remember to include calculated risk and rationale. Because if you don’t taste the nectar, then you’re going to live your whole life wondering, what if? And that feeling takes a lot of energy away from you. This paragraph can be taken as an advertisement for heroin, but I promise that is not my intention. Stay away from hard drugs, please.
Next, in terms of success, any big decision that has paid off in the business or personal development sectors involved some level of courage, meaning that it was a risky move that could fail terribly. When Rosa Parks decided to keep her ass on that chair, she accepted the potential consequence of violence directed towards her, as well as arrest. But she had to accept that risk to make one of the most pivotal moves in the field of racial equality. And also to stand up for herself and show the world that she should be treated no different to anyone else, amplifying the respect she has for herself. On a less monumental scale, if you are not liking your surroundings, such as city, friends, job, etc., take the risky, unfamiliar step and break free. Allow yourself to start again and reinvent yourself. Doing that requires immense courage because there is a lot of risk involved. You could spend months lonely and miserable, waiting for your decision to pay off. But once it does, and you are surrounded by people who love you for you, as well as doing what you feel like God put you here to do, you will never feel more free. Echoing this sentiment, consider this common phrase that I often use throughout my life: “Take the risk or lose the chance.”
FUCK THE EDUCATION SYSTEM
The more educated you are, the less likely you are to take risks. That may sound good at first glance, but as explained above, you need to allow yourself to make mistakes in order to discover who you really are and succeed. What leads me to make this bold claim about the education system? I’m glad you asked. It’s because we are taught in school that we have to avoid failure at all costs. We must strive to get an A, which means we must make the least mistakes possible in our classes. In other words, when you make a mistake, you get penalized and feel ashamed. Those who do well in this system are those who cannot allow themselves to make a mistake. They are fucking terrified of it. Perfection is the only thing they know. On the other side, those who fail in this system are also afraid of mistakes, because they were penalized and treated badly for making them. All in all, education shows us that mistakes should be avoided at all costs. But since our brains were literally developed with this mindset from a young age, we all possess this incorrect ideology. It’s time to break free of the brainwashing. Not only is it more than ok to make mistakes, you are actually a stronger person if you do not fear making them.
When you are considering taking a courageous chance, feel your body before you do anything. If you feel fear and shame, and then start ruminating on all the ways it could go wrong, tap into that little boy or girl at school. How were they feeling when they failed a test? How were they feeling when they brought home a “bad” grade? How were they feeling when their teachers wrote, “Meet me after class,” on their test? What made them feel this way? What were they scared of? Everyone’s answers to these questions will be different, and that’s the beauty of it. But by connecting with your younger self, you will start realizing how school plagued the way you view making mistakes. And until you break that pattern by empathizing with your younger self, as well as understanding their trigger points, you will keep being terrified of messing up. For me, a bad grade meant being seen as the dumb kid in class, my father being utterly disappointed in me, and me feeling absolutely horrible about myself. A kid should never feel that way for a letter on a fucking page. And when I flipped the script, it was all out of shame. I had to do whatever it took to never be seen as dumb and impress my father. Every time I sat down to work, that’s the place I was working from—making me work for others, not myself, which made me incredibly insecure as I constantly needed external validation.
THE SPIRAL
Have you ever found yourself curious as to why you keep making the same mistakes over and over again? Such as, you keep finding yourself dating the same type of person who always hurts you. Here is my answer to that: the spiral. All of us have deeply ingrained points of trauma that are buried deep inside our unconscious minds. That pain causing negative patterns can only be healed once it becomes conscious. And it can only become conscious once you understand why you keep making the same mistakes. For most people, that awareness will not come the first time a mistake is made. It takes a while usually, which is where the spiral comes in. You might find yourself making the same mistakes over and over again until you find the point of trauma. And that’s perfectly fine because that’s what your own mind requires. I had to endure several terrible relationships until I realized why I was attracted to distant women: my mother tended to be distant with me growing up. Once that unconscious point of trauma rose to consciousness, I stopped making the same mistakes. But I needed the exact number of mistakes I made to get there. If you keep making the same mistakes, or your friend keeps making the same mistakes, save the judgment and allow the process to unfold. Understand that your mind has its own unique spiral and whatever mistakes you make will lead you to the answer you are looking for.
