I make a lot of mistakes, I would say I mentally or verbally say “whoops” at least ten times a day. I like to say that I learn from my mistakes but more often than not I don’t. I’m very much the person who thinks that the last mistake I made doing the same exact thing was a fluke and it won’t happen again, even if I make the same mistake ten times, by ten I usually learn.

I am unfortunately one of those people that values mistakes long after they happen. I look for warning signs in new relationships that caused an old relationship to fail– for example I will never include homemade cookies in a gift to a guy I’m dating since two relationships failed after me giving them cookies. I’m not saying that’s why but who know? It could be a contributing factor.  However, I also believe that I learned other things from those failed relationships. If a guy breaks up with you and says he still wants to be friends, he doesn’t really want to be friends. If everyone tells you that a guy is a womanizer and a player, he probably is. If your parents don’t like one of your friends, they probably aren’t a good friend. If someone is nice to your family and makes an effort to get to know your siblings, they’re probably a decent person. If food doesn’t taste right, it’s probably not right.

Mistakes are this part of life that in the moment everyone dreads more than anything, yet later they help you make so many choices and decisions. You mistakenly trust the wrong people, mistakenly hurt the right ones, take a right turn instead of left, show up to an event an hour late because you wrote down the wrong time, finished a paper is a rushed week and it turns out you had another week to do it. Mistakes happen and then you remember to second check yourself. You learn the right characteristics of a good person and the ones a bad one, you remember to put on the directions rather than ignore them because you think you know the way, you double check times when you know you have plans that day, and you really read the dates in your syllabus so you aren’t trying to do a billion assignments in one week. Mistakes form habits and what you do on a daily basis. They are the foundation for everything you do. As much as we as people hate making them they can be fun and exciting or filled with dread and regret. In the end it’s these that help us to develop as people. Mistakes are beautiful and fantastic and altogether terrible but they are so useful in personal development that just makes it perfect.

I am trying to treasure my mistakes and keep them as a type of award for doing something dumb or not doing something at all in order to produce good in my life.