Mistakes Help Us Grow

None of us are perfect and we all make mistakes. Personally I have made quite a few mistakes, mostly due to my willingness to go head first into things. No one likes to make mistakes, the feeling of your heart dropping in your stomach when you realize that you have made mistake is a bad feeling. But we learn from those mistakes and that helps us to hopefully not repeat the same mistake again. Mistakes are a good thing, and I do believe that we all need to make mistakes to grow as people.

A friend of mine, who for the sake of confidentiality goes by the pseudonym of Jake made a fairly big mistake once. Jake was a rebellious, careless teen. He was just cruising along down town in Topsham. Jake had left a friends house in Auburn and had passed through Lewiston and Lisbon. He was on his way to a restaurant and was running late so he decided he would just put the pedal to the metal. Everything was going smoothly and he was almost to the restaurant. He looked at his GPS system which said he was only 9 minutes away when all of a sudden a car in the opposing lane put their blue lights on. His heart dropped. Then the cop got out of his vehicle and approached Jake’s car. Jake was very nervous, his hands were shaking as if it were -20 degrees outside. The cop got Jake’s information and then he went back to his vehicle. The cop was sitting in his cruiser for what felt like an hour, writing a ticket while Jake sat in his car contemplating his mistake. Mistakes were made. It was almost a criminal speeding ticket.

Once he saw those blue lights behind him, Jake knew that he had messed up. He realized that is was almost criminal. He was just driving and being careless, thinking that he would never get pulled over, he could not have been any more wrong. Then Jake got pulled over. Ever since that day of being pulled over and receiving a ticket, he has since been much more careful with his driving habits. Jake pays much more attention now and tends to follow the speed limit as opposed to the careless driving habits he had. After he got his ticket, he drove 5 miles per hour under the speed limit to the restaurant. In the end, Jake was even more late to dinner and ended up with a $300 fine. After he left the restaurant he was thinking. Even if he was late, his friends would have still been there waiting for him. He then realized the cop pulled him over for not only his safety but for the safety of everyone else on the road around him.

I guess that just goes to show that mistakes will be made but in the end we learn from them and they help us become who we are and we come out of it with hopefully a little more knowledge than we had before. So the moral of the story is that mistakes are a good learning experience. No one can be perfect, and when we learn from our mistakes we gain more knowledge that we can pass on to other people so that they can also learn from our mistakes.

Featured Photo Citation

“always make new mistakes” by elycefeliz is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0