National Make A Misteak Day

Wow, I can’t believe it’s been almost a month since I last wrote. Today I made an error that made me pause an think about that every popular topic, “Making mistakes and learning from them.” Don’t get me wrong, I’ve made lots of mistakes since my last blog posting.

Today’s error in judgment was actually made last Friday although I didn’t realize the consequences of the mistake until this morning. To make a long story short, I was in charge of posting some information to the U’s homepage to update some outdated info. My boss asked me to fact check the info but I was unable to get in touch with the appropriate parties because of the holiday; the info seemed straightforward enough that I posted it anyway. You can see where this is going, it turned out to be inaccurate and we received a phone call from someone on campus today. The woman was quite pleasant and understanding, but I shouldn’t have made the error – after all, I’ve learned this lesson before: hastiness is foolishness.

Although the error was stupid and simple, I quickly acknowledged the error to everyone involved and apologized. Everyone involved seemed to be okay with it, except for myself.

For those who know me, I can be quite hard on myself. The whole experience has caused me to relive similar and even unrelated errors I’ve made in the past. But rather than get depressed this time around, I resolved to look at the mistake (and all of my mistakes really) constructively, as opportunities to learn and grow.

Whenever I make a mistake, I think of a story my brother-in-law told me when he was a boy. He had borrowed the family car to run an errand and got in an accident while he was out. Upon returning home, with the car completely smashed up and the front bumper dragging on the ground, his dad saw him pull up in the damaged car. Rather than yell, blame, and interrogate, his dad simply said, “Well, did you learn something?”

So, today, I’m resolving to learn from my mistakes by declaring March 25, “National make a misteak day.” (misspelling intentional) Today, I’m resolving to graciously accept my mistakes and look at my errors through new glasses, to determine what went wrong, what I could and could not control, and what decisions I would make if presented with a similar problem. In the meantime, I ask for your patience and promise you’ll have my patience in return.

I found this great article online about mistakes which I think you might find very interesting. http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/44-how-to-learn-from-your-mistakes/.