“If a mistake is not a stepping stone, it is a mistake.”- Eli Siegel

I believe that as long as you make your best to learn something from your mistakes, you haven’t made a mistake. I actually think it’s more of the other way around. If you never make mistakes you will never learn anything, because you have no reason to look for something else. My mistakes in the past have made who I am today, and my mistakes today will make me who I will be tomorrow. But only if I choose to learn from them.

Of course I don’t set out to make mistakes, but when it happens I don’t see it as a bad thing but as a good thing. Why? Because it taught me something I obviously didn’t know, but since I made the mistake I now know that’s not the right thing or way to do it. Are you with me?

If I would step outside in the gazing sun without wearing any sunscreen and I got burnt, I would learn from my mistake and wear sunscreen the next time I step out in the sun. Or if I were baking a cake and I changed the recipe and it didn’t turn out well, than I would know that that was not a good way to do it so I won’t do it again. Right? It is the same thing with everything in life. Nothing is a waste of time as long as you choose to learn something from it. Save the knowledge and use it when it’s needed. In my opinion, that is what the mistakes are all about.

Once you’ve come that far, as to start seeing your mistakes as something good instead of something bad, you are starting to use the mistake as a stepping stone for the rest of your life. Some knowledge you attain you save up in your inner library, to take out when needed, and some of it you can put into active use in your everyday life. You’ll find out for yourself what knowledge goes where. The important thing to remember is to actually use the knowledge, though, because if you learn something and don’t use what you learn to get ahead you haven’t actually learnt anything. Some things are harder to learn than others and some times I’ve made the same mistake several times before I started to use what I already knew, from previous times, and that’s the second I gained the knowledge.