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This bootcamp is designed to help you gain insight into who you are, and help you determine the best approach to improve your life.
In Day 8, we learned about the importance of Belief and Confidence. Today, we are going to cover a very important area, learning from your mistakes.
If you are trying many things, some of them are going to go wrong. There is no way around it. If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not trying hard enough, not stretching yourself. Winston Churchill use to say that “All men make mistakes, but only wise men learn from their mistakes.” Oprah Winfrey added to Winston Churchill by saying that: “There are no failures, only lessons to be learned.”
I want to share one of my favorite personal and very real “Learning from my mistakes stories”. Let me take you back to October, 1994.
I was enjoying my work and feeling very civic minded, so I decided to run for City Council in the town where I lived, Hoboken, New Jersey. I was young and energized. We had 40,000 people living in my town, and we had what was called a bedroom community. Most of the people in the town worked during the day and came home at night to sleep.
I loved technology and thought that I could use it to spread the word about my campaign using it. I didn’t have much of a budget at the time. I decided to use an automated phone messaging system. Many of you are probably familiar with this technology now, but it was relatively new 10 years ago. You recorded your message and the computer automatically called people on the phone and left messages for them on their answer machines.
I spent countless hours writing and recording the perfect message. I spent even more hours getting everybody’s telephone number inputted into the computer and I was ready. Every single person in Hoboken, NJ was going to get a personalized phone call from David Riklan, future city council member.
I loved the idea.
Early one Tuesday morning, I set up my computer to make the phone calls, and left for work. All day, I was excited about the impact that these calls were having on my campaign. Then, I came home that night and found out that “Murphy” came to visit that day. Apparently, the computer started to run slower and slower during the day. By the time I came home, I was leaving messages for people that were going slower and slower with each call.
I turned off the computer and listened to my voice messages. I have never heard so many angry messages in my life. I learned a few new words that night with a blunder that might have possibility caused me the election. In case you are wondering, I didn’t get elected. My lesson was extremely clear, Check and double check your technology. Technology can be your best friend, but don’t let it get the best of you.
My challenge for everybody listening is to try to learn from their mistakes, and don’t forget that it’s also important to learn from other peoples mistakes.
I have a few ideas for everybody listening to help you learn from your mistakes. The first step is to analyze what went wrong and think through what you can do the next time. Really it think it through. What went wrong and what can you do next time? The second step is to develop or implement what we might call Plan B. Very simply, Plan B is an alternate plan to accomplish the same goal? It’s also a good idea to have your plan B ready even before your failure or mistake. This way you can jump right into plan B without delay.
Many of the other things you can do fit into what I describe as mental learning or re-framing. When you have made a mistake, focus on what you have learned from the mistake and how this will make you better, stronger and faster the next time. When possible, try to maintain your sense of humor about the situation.
Try not to take rejection personally. Frequently our idea, our product or our plan might fail. This does not mean we are failures. We just needed a different plan, a different road map. One common thing that people do when they make mistakes is beat themselves up about it. Try not to do this “by staying focused on your original goal.” And, don’t forget the batman reference from the other week. Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.
Make sure you learn from your mistakes and pick yourself up.
Thanks for watching, We’ll talk again on Day 10.
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