You Won't Grow Up Until You Mess Up

On the eve of my birthday, I am taking time to reflect...  I have made many mistakes over my lifetime… we all do. But I have learned that life is FULL of mistakes. You can’t practice perfection. We are all fallible people, and we WILL mess up… often! Self-respect is important but you won’t get it from anyone else. It comes from within…

You won’t grow up until you mess up.

My daughter traveled abroad last month. I offered her some precautions she should take to prevent problems. She wouldn’t hear any of my suggestions. She thought she knew how to handle every unforeseen difficulty. No sooner had she landed then she ran into problems with reservations and schedules. But she figured them out and solved them using her intuition and ingenuity. From this she learned how to solve many of her travel problems on her own.

My great-grandmother used to say, “Bought wisdom is better than taught wisdom.” In other words, “You learn more from experience and expense than you do from others giving you advice for free.”

I guess I learned from life and business that sometimes making mistakes is the best way to learn how to do things right the next time. No successful person has gotten where they were without messing something up. Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Louisa May Alcott and Oprah Winfrey all made mistakes on their way to success.