Mistakes Create Learning Patterns

People everyday say things like “Everyone Makes Mistakes” or people will test things, even as children we test things to find the outcome of what will happen because of curiosity. These things are simply trial and error. You put your hand on a stove; you will get burned, you touch something that’s hot it’s probably not going to feel good. Some people truly like to push things to get an outcome or to find out what’s going to happen to them or someone else for being the cause.

I’m going to tell not so much a story about how I’ve made a mistake and learned from it, but a lesson I’ve been taught in life. I’m a high school student, a senior in high school, just like everyone else I’m constantly stressing about where I’m going to go to college, what I’m going to study in college, or the most important question of all that is asked constantly “what are you going to do once you get out of high school and go to college? Well I don’t have everything figured out yet, just like most people, and some people have everything figured out already, but that’s not me sometimes I take things one step at a time slowly, sometimes I will view the big picture too quickly. Well when I’m not stressing about this, or I need to be able to take a break, calm down, and to cope with things, I go to football practice, I learn something important and learn a lesson from it everyday.

Football for me isn’t just butting heads, quick thinking in a short situation, or even just an excuse to be able to exercise. Football allows me to learn important life lessons everyday that, not only I use in everyday life, but also allows me to use these lessons for my future. In football if you make a mistake someone could get hurt, take a step too quick you could miss a block, take a step too short or slow, you could miss or even get hurt yourself, when I make a mistake in football it continues to teach me responsibility. Football has taught me that the sacrifice I need to make to be a better player, and a better young adult is to get things together and to sacrifice my childhood. Every time I’ve made a mistake in football, I forgot about it and fixed it the next time. One can’t let a little mistake permanently bring you down. In football when you get tired, you begin to make mistakes, and that is what’s preached, it allows for a central focus, when you get tired you fix the mistakes, and continuously do it until it’s memorized in your head. For instance, yesterday at practice, I was having a bad day and things didn’t start to good for me, but as it continued I was trying harder and felt happier about practice going along. When I went home at the end of the night after dreading most of the day, I can truly say that the day ended off better. At the end of the day, the take away of making mistakes is that, when you’re tired, or annoyed there is something that can always be gained from these little life lessons or a realization can come from them, whether it’s making mistakes or just going through it.

Photo by; MHS Wildcat. On flickr