"It took Thomas Edison over 1,000 experiments to successfully invent the light bulb. Were the 999 initial experiments failures? Of course not! Each experiment showed Edison what didn't work, and that information was crucial in order to narrow down the possibilities of what did work." -V. Hansen, S. Goodman
I've read lots of quotes like this one before. "Mistakes are learning experiences, we all make mistakes, learn from your mistakes, bla bla bla....but I just don't want to make any mistakes! I don't have time to start all over! I shouldn't make excuses to be lazy!" I've often felt I had to attain some sort of perfection and then I would be able to live my life...to relax, to be loved, to love myself, to soothe myself, to find passions, to enjoy things. Something is different about this Edison quote though. One specific word jumps out at me. From each failure to make a light bulb Edison discovered crucial information toward its development. Would it have been awesome if Edison got it right the first time? Yes. Would that have been possible? Nope...he didn't have all the crucial information! Ya, he could have gotten lucky, but if so, he wouldn't have had a clue how the contraption worked!
Life is a big 'ol contraption of all sorts of experiences, choices, and attitudes. Some of them work and some of them don't. Some of them make us feel good and some of them make us feel like scum. Some of them carry us into positive new passions and some of them keep us stuck in the same old thing we constantly wish to be free from. After making a mistake I would beat myself up and become extremely discouraged. "Failed AGAIN! Back to square one!" My thought was that if I was hard enough on myself I would do things right but if I was "soft" on myself I would never make any progress because then I would just be making a bunch of pathetic excuses along with all of my mistakes.
Now picture Edison...he has just made another mistake and the light bulb didn't work AGAIN! Does he rip up all his notes, crush the prototype, and call himself an idiot before starting over? No, of course not. If he did that he would never develop the light bulb. He would eventually begin making the same mistakes, over and over because he didn't spend the time to look at what didn't work and why.
In life we can trash everything we've just done, try to start all over, and hope "it" doesn't happen again or we can stop...look at what happened, look at what choices we made, look at the circumstances and environment that led up to those choices, and think about something that may work better. If we go through the situation in our mind we can slow it all down, look at the details, and think of things that we might want to change or different choices we could make. I am learning that visualizing discouraging situations and then altering them in my mind's eye not only helps me in similar situations, but also teaches me to slow down in the moment, to realize that it's ok to stop and take a breath and to think about what I want this to look like. I'm also learning that each time I make a mistake I can grasp some piece of "crucial" information about life and myself and then apply it in future experiences. I do not like making mistakes, but, thinking from this perspective, each time I do make a mistake there is part of me that is actually excited because I realize that I have just learned something new about myself or a new way to handle a situation. Trying out that new way of handling the situation in the previously failed circumstance through visualization gives me encouragement because I "see" that I am not doomed to failure. I can see what obviously did not work and what may work better. Then, like Edison, I can use what I've discovered to move along in my experiment of the life contraption.
"'Success' and 'Failure' imply that there will be an end to your learning. There is no end, only the discovery of the choices that work. You will simply become increasingly self-aware and increasingly respectful of your unique body." -V. Hansen, S. Goodman
