A glorious mistake: intent, failure, and lessons learned

George Bernard Shaw stated that: "A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent in doing nothing." Tell us about one of your glorious mistakes. What was your intent? What went wrong? What did you learn from the experience?

George Bernard Shaw stated that "A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent in doing nothing." I would like to insist on this idea by adding a quotation that I very much enjoy: "If one has never made a mistake, one has never tried anything new" (Albert Einstein). I think at this whenever I feel really "stumbled." On one hand, it makes me feel a little more optimistic that things will somehow get repaired. On the other hand, it most often comes as a mental comfort for me when I commit a glorious mistake. After all, smiling never harms.

People make mistakes and they learn from them. I guess this is the fate of an error one makes: to come with a teaching. Personally, I made a few and I became aware of the fact that, as I am still very young, I still have a lot of things to learn, and therefore, a lot of mistakes to make.

I learnt something from every experience. My personal belief is that, as long as you do not commit a fault on purpose and most important, you learn from it, you may benefit from attenuant circumstances to justify your act. Though, I do not intend to support undesirable attitudes and actions, justified by the idea that mistakes are made in the spirit of learning and experiencing. Acting in the same wrong way recurrently is an attitude I strongly damn.

For the current paper, I chose to talk about a past event that significantly impressed me. To begin with, I must say that I have always wanted to be perfect. And although this is not necessarily a bad thing, and working hard to be the best is praiseworthy, this can become extremely exhausting and not only for the individual, but also for the ones around him.

When I was in the middle school, in the seventh grade to be more specific, there was a so called "Robot Competition." We were divided into teams and had to cooperate for designing the most creative, original and functional robot.

As I was the captain of my team, I behaved very strictly and authoritative with my colleagues. I can say, by all means, that my intentions were for the best, and under no circumstances I wanted to act severe with my team. My only goal was to win the competition and I was so fond of this idea that I no more paid attention to the feelings of the others. Working became frustrating and annoying for the rest of the people and it is understandable why I was soon deprived of my captainship.

I was extremely depressed and confused. Everyone blamed me for wanting to win, which I felt was very unfair. My mother was the one playing an extremely important role. She made me understand where I had mistaken and why it was my responsibility to apologize to the others. I remember her words exactly, as they had a very strong impression on me. "Persuading the best is honorable, but persuading perfect is insane" she said, and these words resound to me every time I have the tendency to exaggerate in my actions.

What I have learnt from this occurrence is more important that winning all the competitions in the world. Not only it is impossible to be perfect, but by chasing the illusion of perfection, one can miss the beauty of the making process itself. Designing the robot should have been an opportunity for us to enjoy the reciprocal companion, to have fun, to develop trust and abilities of working in the team. And I deprived my colleagues of this great time they should have had.