The Fine Art of Screwing Up: 
Why Your Latest Disaster is Actually a Masterpiece

So, you made a mistake. A massive, forehead-slapping, looking-around-to-see-if-anyone-saw-that kind of mistake. Let me be the first to offer my warmest, most enthusiastic congratulations. You have officially joined the human race. You are out in the world doing things, making waves, and occasionally capsizing your own boat.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of your recent blunder, let us establish some much-needed perspective. It is important to remember that some mistakes in this world are strictly one-time-only events. For example, consider the overly confident skydiver who discovers, halfway through his rapid descent, that he improperly packed his parachute and instead brought a backpack full of dirty laundry. He will not have the opportunity to optimize his packing routine for his next jump.

Or think about the impulsive teenager who decides to drag race a speeding freight train to the railroad crossing, only to end up in a dead tie. There are no rematches in that league. Then there is the adventurous hiker who ventures just a little too close to the edge of a cliff to get the perfect scenic photograph, only to discover that gravity does exactly what gravity does, and it enforces its laws with extreme and immediate prejudice.

Thankfully, the mistake you are currently agonizing over has significantly less permanent consequences. You might not feel particularly lucky right now. In fact, you might be hiding under your bed, contemplating whether you can legally fake your own demise and move to a remote island where no one knows your name. But the sheer panic, regret, or pain you are experiencing right now is actually a fantastic biological indicator. It is proof that you survived. You are breathing, the world is still spinning, and you still have the ability to make completely different choices tomorrow.

Mistakes are sneaky little gremlins, and they originate from a wide variety of comical sources. Sometimes they are born from faulty information, like trusting a charismatic stranger on the internet who promised you could get rich quick by investing your life savings in virtual tulip bulbs. Sometimes they stem from incomplete information, like agreeing to host a family dinner without realizing your oven is broken and your culinary skills end at boiling water.

Other times, mistakes happen due to an incorrect interpretation of data. You thought your brilliant new idea would revolutionize your life, but it turns out it just created a massive inconvenience for everyone involved.

We also have to acknowledge the high-pressure environments in which we are often forced to make decisions. Life rarely waits for you to be ready. Decisions frequently need to be made long before all the necessary information is available to you, or during times of immense, nail-biting stress.

There are circumstances where you simply do not have the time to sit down with a soothing cup of chamomile tea and weigh all the possible outcomes on a beautifully color-coded pros and cons list. Sometimes, you only have a split second to react. You do not have the luxury of serious contemplation, meditation, or reflection. You just have to cut the red wire or the blue wire and hope nothing explodes.

When the outcome of one of these split-second decisions is less than stellar, it is incredibly tempting to lock yourself in a dark room and relentlessly berate yourself. But let me save you some time: beating yourself up for a poor outcome from a past decision is a completely useless activity. It is the emotional equivalent of running on a treadmill and expecting to arrive in Paris.

Your mistake relates to a historical event. It happened in an earlier time over which you no longer have any jurisdiction, control, or influence. You do not own a time machine. Mistakes are simply a fundamental part of the human experience. Everyone makes them, from the world's most successful CEOs to the guy who invented the umbrella.

Instead of wasting your precious mental energy dwelling on the unchangeable past, why not focus your efforts on the present and the future? That is literally the only place where your control and influence actually work.

Think about it this way: if you were given the exact same circumstances again, knowing only what you knew when you made that earlier decision or reaction, might you make the same decision again? Or would you make a different one? Who can really know? You did the very best you could with the tools, knowledge, and emotional capacity you had at that exact second in time.

Here is the ultimate silver lining to your current cloud of misery: the potential advantage of failure over success is that failure usually offers far more opportunities to learn, adapt, and grow than success ever could. Success can make you complacent. It can make you lazy. It tricks you into thinking you have it all figured out.

Failure, on the other hand, gives you a masterclass in resilience and problem-solving. Excepting, of course, the extreme examples given earlier. For our skydiver, race car driver, and hiker, lessons may have been learned, but unfortunately, they arrived a tad bit too late for a positive outcome.

The bottom line, it seems to me, is that life simply happens. Sometimes we get lucky, the stars align, and everything goes our way. Sometimes we step on a rake in the yard and the handle smacks us squarely in the face. The grand takeaway for anyone breathing is simply this: Never, never, ever, under any circumstances, give up.

Dust off your knees, take a deep breath, and try again. Success is not about achieving flawless perfection on your first try. Success is just getting up one more time than you fall down.

Please share your thoughts and any response you may have in the form below.

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