Picture this: you’re walking to your first class on Monday, still shaking off a bit of sleep but more or less ready to take on the day. The sun is shining, you’ve had your morning coffee and you’re looking forward to getting through your classes and hanging out with your friends in the evening. You break into a power walk. You’re not running late, but you’re not exactly stopping to smell the roses either. You know this route by now, and you’ve timed it well. You’re fashionably on time.
You get to the classroom. You sit down in your tacitly assigned seat, and begin to situate yourself. You pull your headphones out of your ears, put them in the case and pull your laptop out of your backpack and place it in front of you on your desk. Your professor addresses the class with a good morning greeting, eliciting a scattered response. You open your laptop, prepared to type in your password, but are greeted with a black screen. It’s dead. Great.
“As I mentioned last week, we do have a quiz this morning.” Your gaze shifts up from your black computer screen to the front of the class as your professor speaks. “I’ll give you all about thirty minutes. It is open note, so it shouldn’t be too difficult.” Your shoulders relax in relief, and you reach your hand into your backpack to grab your notebook. Nothing. Crap.
You were so focused on getting a place in the line at Starbucks, the song playing through your headphones or the million other thoughts running through your mind that you scarcely noticed that your backpack was lighter than usual. Alas, there’s no time to go back to your room and grab it now. It’s time to take the quiz.
Oops. You did it again. You made a mistake; it’s certainly not the first, and it won’t be the last. Thankfully, forgetting your notes for a twenty-point quiz is definitely not the worst mistake you’ll ever make. Maybe you’ll forget your passport and only realize an hour before an international flight. Maybe you’ll say something insensitive to your best friend that will cause a rift for almost two weeks. Maybe you’ll stay in a relationship too long or dump a good guy at a time when you just weren’t ready for commitment but now you are.
Mistakes are not punishments, they are invitations for growth. Every mistake, no matter how bad it may seem, is always an opportunity to learn and grow. Think of your role model, the coolest, most effortless person you know. They’ve made mistakes. Probably some blunders that were bigger than any you’ve made yourself. A harmless mistake like forgetting or misplacing something is not an indicator of a deep personal flaw. Life happens. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. Even if you make one of those rare mistakes that irreparably changes a situation in your life, it is your personal duty to learn from it. You can always come out better than you were before. As the saying goes, the biggest room in the world is the room for improvement. In the words of Charles R. Swindoll, “Life is 10% what happens to you, and 90% how you react to it.”
Now this advice sounds all well and good, but it might be hard to remember when you feel that pit in your stomach, the anxiety you feel when you’re going through it, when you’re worried that you’ve made a big mistake. Here’s something to remember when you’re in the thick of it: everything you’ve ever been through, you’ve gotten through. Really, everything! Everything that’s ever stressed you out, every time you’ve felt overwhelmed by school or work or a relationship problem, you’ve come out the other side. In the middle it feels like the end of the world, but afterwards you realize it was never that serious. No mistake, no matter how bad it may seem at the time, is going to break you. You will keep winning. Keep going. You’ve got this.