VIRTUOUS MISTAKE

April 3rd, 2019

The right mistake can produce a wonderful pressure to do the right thing.

Say for example we have a need to renew a passport or some form of identification.  Booking tickets for a trip suddenly becomes a huge motivation to go to the right offices to sort out the new identification.  This is not the intuitive or ideal order of operations, but the mistake of switching the steps makes the whole process move along much faster.

Saying the wrong thing at a business meeting might be a mistake that gets a person fired, but being freshly unemployed is a fantastic pressure to push someone towards a better circumstance.

Often such an occurrence is referred to as a ‘silver lining’, which is an effort to optimistically see the positive in a situation that is more easily categorized as negative.

But this simplifies the world far too much.  We can consciously initiate actions that may seem like mistakes in order to further benefit ourselves.

In fact, it might be better to blow past the ‘silver-lining’ idea and assume that all mistakes produce good results.  At the very least this will make a person far more likely to take action as opposed to perseverating over some static idea of what should be done or can’t be done.

It’s long been said that there are lessons in failure.  If this is the case than nearly all action outside the realms of violence is progress as long as we have the awareness to capture the fruit of a success and see the lesson in a mistake.

This episode references Episode 352: Order of Operations