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day, and thank you for being here with us
today. We hope that your week
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fantastic time in your life. Please enjoy the
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One of the least disguised of the Master Teachers in Disguise is
Mistakes. Mistakes, obviously, show us what needs
improving. Without mistakes, how would we know what we had
to work on?
This seems an invaluable aid to learning, and yet many people
avoid situations in which mistakes might take place. Many
people also deny or defend the mistakes they've made--or may be
making.
There is a story told of Edison, who made, say, 1,000 unsuccessful
attempts before arriving at the light bulb. "How did it
feel to fail 1,000 times?" a reporter asked. "I
didn't fail 1,000 times," Edison replied. "The
light bulb was an invention with 1,001 steps."
Why don't most of us see our own lives in this way? We think
it goes back to unworthiness. We assume a façade of
perfection in a futile attempt to prove our
worthiness. "An unworthy person couldn't be this
perfect," the façade maintains. Alas, being human, we
make mistakes. Mistakes crack the façade. As the
façade crumbles, a frantic attempt is made to hide the hideous
thing (unworthiness) the façade was designed to hide--from
ourselves as much as from others.
If we didn't play this game of denial with ourselves, we would
make mistakes when we make them, admit them freely, and ask not,
"Who's to blame?" or "How can I hide this?"
but "What's the lesson here? How can I do this better?"
The goal becomes
excellence, not perfection.
One of the best examples of how strong the taboo against making a
mistake has become is the use of the word sin. In
Roman times, sin was a term used in archery. It meant
simply to miss the mark. At target practice, each shot was
either a hit or a sin. If you sinned, you made corrections
and tried again.
Today, of course, sin means, to quote the American
Heritage, "A condition of estrangement from God as a
result of breaking God's law." Whew. No wonder
people avoid even "the near occasion" of sin. Some
people treat mistakes with the same reverence.
Mistakes are valuable if, for no other reason, they show us what not
to do. As Joseph Ray told us, "The Athenians, alarmed
at the internal decay of their Republic, asked Demosthenes what to
do. His reply: "Do not do what you are doing
now."
In Hollywood, mis-takes are common. (That was wonderful,
darlings. Now let's get ready for take two.")
Give yourself as many re-takes as you need. Stars do
it. ("I didn't feel quite right with that one, Mr.
DeMille. Can we take it again?") Why not you?
A Hollywood song (lyrics by Dorothy Fields) sums it all up:
"Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over
again." Or, to quote an African proverb, "Do not
look where you fell, but where you slipped."
If you're learning, growing and trying new things--expect
mistakes. They're a natural part of the learning
process. In fact, someone once said, "If you're not
making at least 50 mistakes a day, you're not trying hard
enough." What the person meant, we think, is that
growth, discovery and expansion have mistakes built into them.
To avoid situations in which you might make mistakes may be the
biggest mistake of all.
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I can clearly remember something that happened when I was in
third grade. I was walking with my mother on a downtown
street in New York City, pushing through crowds on our way to I
no longer remember where. I had just been put in a special
class at school because I had done well on an IQ test, and my
new teacher had told us that being in her class meant that we
were brighter than most of the people in the country. As
we moved through the hurrying crowds, I remembered this and was
filled with an eight-year-old's outrageous pride. I told
my mother that my teacher had said I was smarter than most of
the people around us. She stopped walking immediately and
knelt down so that we were at eye level with each other.
As the crowd flowed past us on either side, she told me that
every one of the people around us had a secret wisdom; each of
them knew something more about how to live, about being happy,
about loving than I did.
I looked up at the people passing by. They were all
adults. "Is this because they are all grown-ups,
Mama?" I asked her, taken aback. "No, darling,
it will always be that way," she told me. "It is
how things are." I looked again at the crowd moving
around us. Suddenly I wanted to know them all, to learn
from them, to be friends.
This lesson became lost among the many others of my childhood,
but shortly after I became a physician I had a dream that was so
powerful that I remembered it even though I did not understand
it. In this dream, I am standing in the threshold of a
door. I seem to have been standing there a long
time. People are passing through the door. I cannot
see where they are going or where they have come from, but
somehow this does not seem to matter. I meet them one at a
time in the doorway. As they pass through they stop and
look into my face for a moment and hand me something, each one
something different. They say, "Here, here is
something for you to keep." And then they go
on. I feel enormously grateful.
Perhaps we are all standing in such a doorway. Some people
pass through it on their way to the rest of their lives, lives
that we may never know or see. Others pass through it to
their deaths and the Unknown. Everyone leaves something
behind. When I awoke from that dream, I had a sense of the
value of every life.
Living
Life Fully, the e-zine
exists to try to provide for visitors of the world wide web a
place
of growth, peace, inspiration, and encouragement. Our
articles
are presented as thoughts of the authors--by no means do
we
mean to present them as ways that anyone has to live
life. Take
from them what you will, and disagree with
whatever you disagree
with--just know that they'll be here for you
each week.
The art
of living does not consist in preserving and clinging to a
particular
mode of happiness, but in allowing happiness to change
its form without being
disappointed by the change; happiness, like a
child, must be allowed to grow up.
Charles
L. Morgan
Patience
I've definitely learned patience the hard way. I grew up as
a person who was probably more patient than his peers, but still
quite impatient. I wanted things now, and I wanted to finish
things as soon as I started them. If something needed to be
done, I often didn't respect the process necessary to do it well;
rather, I tried to get it done as quickly as I could, and that
tendency often resulted in rather mediocre results.
I remember one incident that was rather representative of the way
that I did things: when I was in my last year in college, I
needed a bike and I didn't have much money, so I figured that I
needed to get a used bike. Unfortunately, there weren't many
being offered in my price range, so I bought the first one that I
found within my price range, even though I had misgivings about
doing so even while I was making the purchase. And the
misgivings should have guided me, but I needed the bike now, I
thought.
It turned out to be a horrible bike, and one that I couldn't
really ride comfortably. A few days later, I saw some very
affordable new bikes in a store, and I felt like an idiot because
I had to buy one if I was going to have a bike that I could
use. In that case, my only loss was some money, but as tight
as money was then, it also caused me a great deal of stress and
anxiety to lose even that relatively small amount of money.
One
who is master of patience
is master of everything else.
Lord
Halifax
That's a
relatively minor incident that involves money and
material goods, but it does illustrate an important
point: sometimes in our minds, we believe
that something has to happen quickly if it's going
to happen at all, or if other people aren't going to
be disappointed in us. The truth is, though,
that you can't eat an apple until it ripens, and it
will do so when it's ready. If you eat it too
early, you will pay a heavy price in stomach pains
(and I can vouch for this, too), just as trying to
get a job done quickly often results in a very poor
job--so the praise that you expect for finishing
quickly is replaced by the criticism you receive for
shoddy work.
I know where much of my impatience comes from.
As I studied about being an ACOA, I learned that the
instability of my younger years caused me to get
used to broken promises--and to think that if
something didn't happen now, it wasn't going to
happen at all. The outing that was promised
this weekend never happened because of someone
else's actions, yet if that same someone came home
and said "Let's do this now," it did come
to pass.
As the years have gone by and I've learned to become
more patient, I have seen an amazing transformation
in how I see the world and how I feel about the
world. As I practice patience, I see that
other people--especially my students-- very much
appreciate the fact that I'm not being impatient
with them. And they tend to learn more when
they can learn in their time. My patience
allows me not to expect too much too soon, for I've
learned that not everyone can grasp everything
immediately in every subject. Yes, my students
have to learn certain skills and concepts, but some
of them will get them immediately, and others won't
get them until we've repeated them for several
weeks. That's just life, and the timing I want
isn't necessarily the timing that my students are
able to meet.
Patience
is power. Patience is not an absence
of action;
rather,
it is "timing"; it waits on
the right
time to act, for the right
principles
and in the right
way.
Fulton
J. Sheen
Developing
patience, in my experience, requires a lot of
self-talk--the positive kind. When I need to
be more patient, I need to remind myself, "it
doesn't matter if it's done in ten minutes or in
twenty"; "It's not that important if we
leave at this moment or if we leave in fifteen
minutes"; "I want the job to be done now,
but I also want it to be done well, and I still have
four more steps that I have to do well, or the
finished product won't be as good as I want
it."
It also requires us first of all to be patient with
ourselves. We often have such high
expectations of ourselves that we tend to be very
impatient with our mistakes or our own lack of
sufficient speed. Our own impatience with
ourselves, in fact, often leads to lower self-esteem
and lessened self-respect. And as Brian Adams
says below, impatience breeds a lot of very negative
feelings, and they can be disastrous when they're
directed at ourselves. When we learn to be
more patient with ourselves, there are many more
positive feelings that result, and we become much
more capable and much more effective in all that we
do.
Learn
the art of patience. Apply discipline to
your thoughts
when
they
become anxious over the
outcome of a goal. Impatience breeds
anxiety,
fear, discouragement and failure. Patience
creates
confidence, decisiveness,
and a rational outlook,
which eventually leads to success.
Brian Adams
Sometimes we
mistake patience for weakness, but the patient
person often realizes that it's much more important
for another person to discover his or her own gifts
and shortcomings--the patient person doesn't feel a
need to "fix" other people, and sometimes
will let certain things slide until the other person
recognizes the problems. Patient parents often
let their kids make the same mistake two or three
times because they know that a lesson learned
oneself is almost always preferable to a lesson
given to us by an authority figure like a parent.
Our patience can be a very important boon to
ourselves, but it also can be a very welcome and
very helpful gift to other people in our
lives. The cashier who makes a mistake can
stand to be shown a bit of patience. The
co-worker who's overwhelmed with work and who hasn't
been able to get to our project yet. The child
who's still learning how to do something and is
taking a very long time at it still. So many
people can use our patience, and their lives will be
made much, much easier when we share it with them.
And our lives, too, will become much easier, much
more effective, and much more pleasant when we
develop our patience and we become patient people.
Have the attitude that
no one,
except you,
owes you
anything.
Give without expecting
a thank-you in
return. But when someone
does
something for you, be
appreciative of even
the smallest gesture.
It seems that
one year, there was a class of students who were so unruly that they
burned out two different teachers. One teacher took early
retirement and the other decided to get out of teaching
altogether. This class was so bad that substitute teachers
began to refuse to take it. So the district called a teacher
who had applied for a job but hadn't made the cut that year.
They asked her if she would be willing to come in and finish out the
year in return for the promise of a full-time position the next
year. She eagerly accepted.
The principal
decided not to warn the teacher about the class, afraid that she
would be scared off if she heard what she was up against.
After the new teacher had been on the job for a month, the principal
sat in on a class to see how things were going. To his
amazement, the students were well-behaved and enthusiastic.
After the students had filed out of the classroom, the principal
stayed behind to congratulate the teacher on a job well done.
She thanked him but insisted that he deserved thanks for giving her
such a special class, such a great class, for her first
assignment. The principal hemmed and hawed and told her that
he really didn't deserve any thanks.
She laughed
and told him, "You see, I discovered your little secret on my
first day here. I looked in the desk drawer and found the list
of the students' IQ scores. I knew I had a challenging group
of kids here, so bright and rambunctious that I would really have to
work to make school interesting for them because they are so
intelligent." She slid the drawer open and the principal
saw the list with the students' names and the numbers 136, 145, 127,
128, and so on written next to the names.
He exclaimed,
"Those aren't their IQ scores--those are their locker
numbers!" Too late. The teacher had already
expected the students to be bright and gifted--and they had
responded positively to her positive view and her positive handling
of them.
Remember:
not everyone will like you, your goals, or your
actions. But don't let
the fear of criticism stop you
from doing what you want. Accept criticism as a
part
of life, and learn from it where possible. And, most
importantly, stay true
to your own values and
convictions. If others don't approve, so what?
Jeff Keller
Yes, life
can be mysterious and confusing--but there's much of life that's
actually rather dependable and reliable. Some principles apply
to life in so many different contexts that they can truly be called
universal--and learning what they are and how to approach them and use
them can teach us some of the most important lessons that we've ever
learned.
My doctorate is in Teaching and Learning. I use it a lot when I
teach at school, but I also do my best to apply what I've learned to
the life I'm living, and to observe how others live their lives.
What makes them happy or unhappy, stressed or peaceful, selfish or
generous, compassionate or arrogant? In this book, I've done my
best to pass on to you what I've learned from people in my life,
writers whose works I've read, and stories that I've heard.
Perhaps these principles can be a positive part of your life, too! Universal Principles of Living Life Fully. Awareness of
these principles can explain a lot and take much of the frustration
out of the lives we lead.
Explore all of our
quotations pages--these links will take you to the first page of each
topic, and those pages will contain links to any additional pages on
the same topic (there are five pages on adversity, for example).
™
