4 Mistakes And Life Lessons To Be Grateful For

Source: Abraham Gonzalez Fernandez / Getty

Let’s be honest: making a mistake is painful. The ego is not a fan of mistakes. As creative, intelligent humans, we like to think of ourselves as competent, smart and – if we’re being very real – better at things than others. That’s why our instinct, when we make a mistake, is to remove ourselves from it as far and as quickly as possible, instead of looking for the life lessons to be learned. It’s like a bad smell we want to get rid of. But the truth is, if you’re willing to face the mistake and even break it down, it could be a gift.

Countless studies have found that there is one common characteristic of successful people: how they handle mistakes. Many of those studies are reviewed in detail in the book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (definitely worth a read if you’re feeling stuck). But the main point of the book is that there are two mindsets: the growth one and the fixed one.

Growth-minded individuals believe that, if they work at something, they have limitless potential to get good at it. Fixed mindset people believe that we’re all born with a permanent and unchangeable amount of aptitude for any given thing. It can’t be changed, even with work. The second group doesn’t like to learn from their mistakes. They see mistakes as “proof” that they’re untalented, unintelligent, unskilled…you get the idea…so why work at it? But growth mindset people see every mistake as a wealth of lessons and an opportunity to improve. If you’re ready to dive into the pain of past mess-ups, here are life lessons you can actually learn a lot from, and even be grateful for.

Burning A Bridge (Instead Of Just Walking Off It)

Source: GeorgiNutsov / Getty

When we’re young, we see things as black and white and can be stubbornly “principled.” Principled is in quotation marks because many people don’t even really know what their principles are until later in life – or don’t recognize how their actions don’t, in fact, line up with their principles. Burning a bridge is a great example of this. If you’re like a lot of people, you probably left your twenties with quite a few bridges in flames behind you. That’s because, when we’re young, we think it’s the “right thing to do” – completely obliterate a relationship that we find fault in.

Then what happened? You realized you needed a reference for a new job from that boss that you told off. Or you needed a reference for a landlord from that old roommate you cut out of your life. You discover that that colleague you said you “never wanted to see again,” is now the supervisor at your new company. As we age, we learn the world is smaller than we think, and burning bridges, though satisfying in the moment, usually bites us in the ass.

Lesson: A little diplomacy (aka biting that tongue/softening your language) goes a long way in the end. Many bridges we burn, it turns out, we need to cross again to get to future destinations.

Failing To Take Accountability

Source: janiecbros / Getty

In life, we will deal with people who are incompetent, aggressive, annoying—you name it. Put simply, sometimes other people are the problem. But, as much as it sucks to admit, focusing on how other people played a role in your disappointments or failures gets you nowhere. And that’s because we can’t change how other people behave. If you ever fixated on how a failure was everyone else’s fault, chances are, you never made any more progress in that area of your life.

The only way to make consistent progress is to always and only focus on what you can control. That’s what taking accountability is all about. It’s one of those life lessons that’s hard to swallow because, sometimes, other people did play a role in our failures. But there’s little value in focusing on it.

Research out of the Journal of Personality shows that few people actually take accountability. It found that, when we succeed, we give ourselves credit, but when we fail, we blame external factors. It feels good in the moment, because it’s a way of licking our wounds. However, if you think about it, when you blame factors (like other people) beyond your control for your setbacks, where does that leave you? Stuck.

Lesson: Forward momentum is always found in focusing solely one what you can control. Focusing on anything else is only a waste of time.

Not Nurturing Your Real Network

Source: fotostorm / Getty

Another term for this is social climbing. It happens when you focus all of your social energy on making connections with people who you believe can help you – people who have something to offer you – instead of nurturing the people who are already there for you.

It’s common to make this mistake in the earlier years of one’s career. At every party, instead of chatting with your peers, you did everything you could to talk to those more successful than you. And what happened? They didn’t want to talk to you because they wanted to talk to their peers. And then your peers shut you out because you didn’t give them the time of day.

Your peers – the people in the same trenches as you – are the ones you’ll come up with. You’ll go through the same growing pains at the same time together and build bonds over that. Eventually, they’ll take you with them if they succeed – or vice versa. But that can’t happen if you didn’t form those bonds, because you were too busy social climbing.

Lesson: Building a real network is about forming bonds with people at your level. You’ll grow together, and help each other when you have a platform do to so.

Prioritizing The Destination Over The Journey

Source: IURII KRASILNIKOV / Getty

Having a strong work ethic is admirable, and working towards your goals every day is something to be proud of. However, it’s common to make the mistake of focusing just on the destination, and not asking yourself if you enjoy the journey. Here’s why it matters: results are not guaranteed. They’re one of those external factors you can’t control. You can do everything experts say you should do to achieve a certain goal and, at the end of the day, luck, fate, nepotism, the direction of the wind and other things beyond your control will influence the outcome. If you ever worked hard at something you didn’t enjoy, and then didn’t get the outcome you wanted, this is one of those painful life lessons.

It’s important to create a day-to-day life that you enjoy. Don’t tell yourself, “I can be happy someday when this or that happens.” This or that may never happen. The only thing you can control is making sure that you build a journey you enjoy. The destination might change, or you could never get there. You don’t want to wake up one day and realize you lived in a miserable way for years, all for the sake of an outcome that never came to fruition.

Lesson: Make sure you enjoy the work that goes into pursuing a goal. The work is the only thing that’s guaranteed.