The English poet Alexander Pope wrote, ‘To err is human; to forgive, divine.’
This saying has now become a well-known proverb. It is a fact that
everyone makes mistakes. This is part of human nature. But there are two
kinds of mistakes. The first one is simply a mistake. There is another
kind of mistake, that is, a ‘mistake plus’. The first kind of mistake
fails to give you anything. But, a ‘mistake plus’ gives you many great
things. A mistake plus seems to be a mistake in the beginning, but in
the end it becomes an experience of gain.
When
one makes a mistake, there are two possible kinds of responses. The
first response is to become regretful. One who is full of regret will
become disheartened after every mistake. He will be a victim of stress.
It is also possible that he may lose courage and be unable to do
anything else again.
This
is the negative aspect of making a mistake. But there is also a
positive aspect. That is, it encourages you to engage in introspection
and self-reassessment. When you do this, your mistake will turn into a
mistake plus. A mistake plus is bound to activate your mind.
It will lead to brainstorming. In return, it will emerge as a natural
gift for you. It will increase your creativity and produce a thinking
process that may lead to the capacity for better re-appraisal of
yourself and an increased ability to analyze things. A mistake becomes a
mistake plus when it awakens your mind. It thus enables you to re-plan
your life. A mistake plus makes a man a superman.
Nature’s
greatest gift to man is his mind. The mind is the greatest miracle of
nature. German psychologist Alfred Adler observed: “One of the
wonder-filled characteristics of human beings is their power to turn a
minus into plus.” Now there is the question of how this miracle may come
about? The answer is that if a person makes a mistake and saves himself
from being a victim of negative thinking, then by nature a miraculous
event occurs. That is, by the law of nature a rethinking process is
developed in him. He analyses what happened with him and tries to
understand where he went wrong. He thinks how he may achieve at the
second attempt what he could not at the first attempt. In this way a new
process of positive thinking is initiated in the mind of this person,
which becomes a means for his intellectual development. Thus, this
process turns his mistake into a mistake plus.
A
mistake is an error or fault resulting from poor judgement. If you
think positive, your mistake will motivate you to try to find out where
you went wrong. This kind of rethinking will open up new possibilities
to you. Thus, in an indirect way, the mistake will become a means to
climb to new heights of success in life.
The
condition for turning a mistake into a mistake plus is that one should
not take a mistake to be a full stop. Rather one should consider a
mistake as a comma. If one makes a mistake ten times, one should put a
comma at each instance. One should not put a full stop unless one’s
mistake has turned into a mistake plus.
Remember that in this world
the quantum of mistakes is limited, but the quantum of achievements is
unlimited. No mistake can close the door to your achievement, provided
you are able to keep your thinking positive.
