What is this nonsense I keep reading and hearing? That you’re not defined by your mistakes or that your failures don’t define you?
You are the sum of all your experiences, including all your fears. your mistakes define you in part.
You are, and I say this owning up to mine, the product of all your failures and successes. It is your character – or the world’s perception of it – that defines you best, that tells the world who or what you are.
Imagine for an instance that the people I let down before (and those I will let down in the future) will not see me differently after my failures to them. Apply that same logic to the people you do well by, and you see the ridiculous irony of the “caveat” I refute in my opening sentence.
Say it to yourself: I am not defined by my successes. I am not defined by what I do well.
What a ridiculously irresponsible statement to make. Still, the world embraces a similarly frivolous idea for the sake of perceived positivity.
And while I do think that the positivity movement has good intentions, it mostly offers recipes for failure. It takes the new conventional idea of celebrating mediocrity and elevates it to the level of virtue.
But we all know what my favourite paving material is.
Mistakes are a sign that you have more to learn in certain areas, they point to errors in cognitive function and coordination, they should, at the very least, define your self-perception.
My contention is that if you allow your mistakes to tell you where you stand in terms of your true knowledge and understanding of the world so you can improve upon them, they will not define you for long; if you don’t, you’ll continue to be a reflection of them (your mistakes) to the people around you.
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Borrowed from my human formed and originally posted in the Love’s Dialogue Facebook group.
Yes, it’s the bigger picture. We are made of so many parts. None can be more important than the other.
Well said, Devil. 🙂
Thanks! And you have struck it quite well.