Mistakes

Learning from your mistakes it the lazy and dangerous way to handle mistakes. The common phrase “learn from your mistakes” you hear is inviting though. It gives us permission, of sorts, to mess up—as long as the lesson you take away from the mistake is valuable. I don’t mean to say that you can’t learn from mistakes, you can and should. Most mistakes anyway. Some do lead to death and dismemberment, so I want to suggest alternate way to deal with mistakes, that is to anticipate what would or could go wrong in a given situation and work to avoid it. To do this I’m going to use an analogy to playing the trading card game Magic the gathering.

What you need to know about the game to understand this is that (1) you have to make decisions and those decisions can either help  you win by defeating your enemy (who must die!) or lead to your downfall (death). You also need to know (2) that your decisions are based on known information (your cards—I said it was a trading card game ) and your opponents cards—unknown information. The parallel to real life is apparent, I hope. In a given match, usually lasting between 25 minutes to 4 hours, you will make many decisions that will impact your chances of winning, as is the case with any game of skill (luck is involved, sure, but life has it’s luck, as well).

It is crucial in the game (and life) to figure out what decisions will be the best decisions and what will be the mistakes. The best players anticipate what a mistake will be before they make it and seek to understand why it would be a mistake, and what would be an acceptable alternative. This is how victories are won consistently in a game where variables are changing constantly, much like life.

 A lot can be learned from making mistakes, but that is not an excuse to make them. I’m not sure my poetry has benefited from this thinking, but my life has and those two are linked in the most intimate way.