TRANSCRIPT
What is the value in making mistakes? I grew up being horrified and terrified of being anything other than perfect. When I was anything other than perfect—perfect according to the definition of my parents, but by extension also even my teachers, other people, other authority figures in my life—I got loved less. I was abandoned more and more. And so what I developed is a real perfectionistic streak where I was terrified of making mistakes. I didn’t want to make mistakes. And as the end result of that perfectionistic streak, I became anxious. Sometimes I even became frozen, paralyzed. I couldn’t do things. I couldn’t move forward in my life. Or when I did move forward in my life, I did it in a much more timid way. I only really spoke out and did things when I was pretty darn sure I wouldn’t screw up.
Well, as I got older, I saw that this was a pretty dysfunctional way to live. It wasn’t helping me live my life. And so I started opening up and trying things much more and sometimes taking a lot more risks. And in earlier ways, earlier times in my life, some of those risks had consequences. I made some dumb mistakes. I did some pretty naive things that hurt myself, hurt other people. Sometimes, lucky I didn’t get myself killed. But looking back on it, and even looking at my life now, what is the value in making mistakes? Well, there’s only one real big one that I can think of. The real value in making mistakes is it’s a chance for us to take a step out of our lives and observe ourselves, to gain perspective on who we are and to see who we really are. What are our strengths? What are our weaknesses?
And sometimes it’s very hard to look at ourselves in a very, in a way, dispassionate, objective way unless we really screw up. I think a lot of times, from what I’ve seen, the people who only succeed end up doing well in one sense, but they get stunted along the way. And they become even more terrified of making mistakes. They become more rigid in a way. They take fewer healthy risks because they don’t have the experience of getting knocked down and having to fight their way back up. People who have never been knocked down and learned to fight their way back up don’t have that strength that resiliency brings.
Now, I think that’s something that we can learn again and again and again. I know for myself, I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I’ve made some really bad ones. I’ve talked about this in other videos, like how I love that line from that Freddie Mercury song: “And bad mistakes, I’ve made a few.” Well, I’ve made some. And part of making those mistakes has been it’s given me that chance to really study myself. Now, in part earlier in my life, when I made mistakes, the first thing that I wanted to do was pretend that I hadn’t made a mistake, just bury it, deny it, even look at myself as a victim or try to find ways to explain my way out of it. Oh, or “I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it.” But as time went on and I got stronger, and I got more away from people who just simply rejected me when I screwed up, I started seeing, you know, I really can learn from this. I can really own what I have done that is bad or wrong or harmful to other people, harmful to myself, and really study it.
But most importantly, I think, study why did I make those mistakes? Especially interpersonal mistakes that really did cause harm to other people or ruptured relationships that I was in—friendships, whatever type of relationship—and really see what was I acting out? What has been done to me that caused me to make this mistake? One thing I’m very glad that I had was a journal that I could write down what I had done. I could write down my reactions in a safe place—a safe place to really lovingly study what did I do. For me, that has been the value: to really learn from my screw-ups and really fundamentally change. Not just apologize or say I’m sorry, but to really look at myself and say, “Who am I? Why did I do this?” And not in terms of a public relationship with anyone else, but a private relationship with myself to really fundamentally think about who I am, why I did what I did, what caused me to behave this way, and how can I change it? And how do I need to change it?
And so I think for me, if I hadn’t made mistakes, if I hadn’t been able to own my mistakes and look at it, I wouldn’t have been able to end up in the place where I am now. And to extrapolate it forward, I think it’s the same thing now—to look at my behavior still, to look especially at my bad behavior when I see it, that it happens. When I see things come out of my mouth that I don’t like, when I see things interpersonally that I do that I think, “That’s not all that healthy,” or “That’s not as healthy as I could be,” or “That doesn’t live up to my standards, that doesn’t live up to my ethics, that doesn’t live up to my morals,” to really be able to take a step back and look at myself and love myself in spite of my bad behavior.
And to really say, “Ah, this is a chance for me to know more about my history, to know more about what’s buried inside of me, to know more about my unconscious motivations, to learn more about areas in myself in which I’m still traumatized and I didn’t realize it.” Because I know that there’s still areas inside of myself that aren’t healthy. And one of the basic ways that I know this is by my bad behavior. My bad behavior is an expression of unresolved trauma in myself. And fundamentally, one of the basic ways that I know that I am healing is by seeing how much I am acting out bad behavior, that I actually do make fewer and fewer interpersonal mistakes. I harm people less. I harm myself less. I’m more honest. I’m more authentic. And for me, by tracking that progress, by seeing who I’m becoming as I grow in my life, as I get older, that’s how I get more confidence in myself and also how I get stronger at being able to instantly own my mistakes as I do them and to be able to take a step back and really self-reflect on what I’m undoing.