“To avoid situations in which you might make mistakes may be the biggest mistake of all.”
Life is inherently risky. When you step outside, there’s a distinct possibility that you could get hit by a runaway car. When you go to a job interview, you may slip up on one of the questions and blow your chances of landing the position.
That doesn’t mean that you should avoid going outside or that you should skip all job interviews, though. After all, you’d be bypassing everything that life has to offer if you just holed yourself up within your comfort zone.
And that’s the main message that we get from Peter Alexander Williams (1949 – 2000) and his quote above. It doesn’t matter how many times you fall down; it’s how many times you get back up. You’re allowed to make mistakes. Indeed, it’s almost preferable to make mistakes, because that’s how you learn and that’s how you get better at what you do.
If you avoid situations where you have the chance of making a mistake, this means that you are necessarily restricting your ability to grow, to evolve and to learn. When you make that mistake, you gain new insights and you’re able to expand your skill set. Yes, accept that failure is likely, but it is only through this acceptance that you give yourself a chance at success.
Peter McWilliams was a writer and self-publisher, authoring such self-help books as Life 101. In later years, he became an advocate for the legalization of medical marijuana, suffering from AIDS and cancer himself.
I always like the snippets that have to do with having to try to succeed. Playing it safe does not make you a success, just a soldier in life. The only thing that I am really against risk is with my retirement money.
A quote from sports reflects what you are talking about today: “Never up, Never in.” which is a golf saying for putting. You can’t win if you don’t get the putt to the hole. For all you hockey fans that read this blog, it’s like when your tram is on the power play and they do all this fancy passing and never score. What do we as fans always yell? SHOOT! You don’t put the puck on the net you can’t score.
I think that as with everything there needs to be a balance. When it’s pretty clear that doing something is a mistake, there’s no need to confirm it by personal experience. Avoiding doing something when there is a good possibility of making a mistake while doing it when otherwise it is generally a good thing to do that tends to produce good results is not necessarily wise.