The Beauty in Messing Up
Make mistakes, please!
NO ONE is perfect. While this is said time and time again, do we ever really listen?
We can be so hard on ourselves. We watch someone ‘effortlessly’ accomplish something, yet we become frustrated when we try and it doesn’t feel the same.
But how could it be the same? We are all at different stages of learning- and of living! Seeing someone else’s work shows you their skill level, but it does NOT show you how many mistakes over the hours, days and years they have made to be able to hone their skill well enough to create it.
When we see other people as guideposts, it’s easy to find ourselves feeling inadequate. It’s great to become inspired and motivated by what someone else is doing, but if we forget to consider their entire journey- mistakes included- then we are in danger of falling into the fear of failure. And contrary to what we’d like to believe, we need failure.
We learn by failing. That’s what experience is. That’s what all of those days, hours and years are- a bunch of mess ups. A bunch of little mess ups that are executed slightly different every time, so that each one becomes less of a mistake and more of a, “Hey, I think I actually did it this time!” And then you repeat.
When someone has experience with something, it means that they have tried and failed at doing it so many times that they were able to find the one way that works out of a sea of ways that didn’t. If they documented their learning process in a YouTube video, it would take us months, if not years to watch it. We’d see them messing up plenty. But somewhere in the footage, we’d also see the eureka/light bulb moment! The moment when they realize that all of their messing up wasn’t really messing up at all. It was learning.
