It’s officially the holiday season, which means plenty of cooking and baking. And with cooking and baking often come countless imperfections: overbaked, underbaked, not enough salt, too much seasoning, burnt, too tough, still raw—the list goes on. As one does during the holidays, I’ve spent my fair share of time recently trying to create food that others will enjoy. However, I still struggle to produce perfect results every time. It’s not because I’m not following instructions (though sometimes I wing it), not paying attention, or because I’m a bad cook. I believe it’s more a reflection of how difficult it is to truly make something perfect.
It’s human nature to want things to turn out exactly as we envision, and when they don’t, we often feel disappointed. This sentiment applies to all aspects of life: work, relationships, even trivial decisions like choosing the right outfit. Maybe that report you prepared for your boss didn’t quite add up. Or that date where you thought you said something clever, only to be met with a puzzled look. Or the outfit you thought was fire but prompted your friend to ask, "What are you wearing?" Life is full of disappointments, and as time passes, we’ll continue to encounter new reasons to feel let down.
So what’s the point of reminding you of all the things that can go wrong in life? It’s to remind you that we all make mistakes and that’s what makes us human. Mistakes provide opportunities to learn, grow, and build on what we’ve learned. When you face setbacks, you have two options: you can adopt a glass-half-empty mindset, feel bad for yourself, and possibly never try again or you can take a glass-half-full approach, learn from the experience, and use it to improve.
Consider anything significant ever achieved throughout history. Success was rarely the result of someone giving up, it was often the result of perseverance in the face of mistakes. Oddly enough, this idea came from a shower thought I had about how much effort and how many resources went into building my bathroom. From there, I thought about my apartment unit, my furniture, and ultimately my entire building.
Take my apartment and all the objects within it, it’s a product of thousands of people working together. The furniture, for instance, required people to harvest raw materials, craft components, coordinate shipping, and manage retail logistics before it finally arrived at my home. Throughout that entire supply chain, countless things could’ve gone wrong and likely did, but in the end the desired outcome was achieved.
And that’s just a piece of furniture. Consider the people who built the building I live in: construction workers, electricians, designers, architects, plumbers, and more all playing a role in creating the place I call home. When you start piecing together the countless contributions from so many individuals, it’s remarkable how much can be accomplished through human effort.
Explaining how my apartment came together may seem like a strange way to connect to the theme of this post, but I find it truly remarkable how much people can achieve when they put their minds to something. Everyone plays a role in this journey we call life, and from my perspective, everyone has something valuable to offer. Mistakes will continue to happen every day, made by people all over the world, myself and yourself included. But if you can begin to appreciate the reasons behind those errors, your next success might feel even sweeter.
So, don’t be too hard on yourself. Try not to dwell on what went wrong. Instead, find beauty in human error and keep striving toward your goals.
After all, mistakes are really just happy accidents.
