The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually afraid of making one.
Elbert Hubbard
You expand your capacities by doing. Think of your ability as a point; that dot can only expand outward toward your potential if you do something new or do more. Staying in your comfort zone keeps you from growing as a person. Experience develops you because you grow by first acting, then learning from your mistakes, and improving through trial and error.
The most regrettable thing is an intelligence that is afraid of being tested because it doubts itself, or holds high expectations of its owns capacities and despairs of perfection. Such a mind will resist learning and growth for fear of making the very mistakes that will grow it. Children can make mistakes without feeling embarrassed by them but that gets socialised out of them by adolescence.
Your intelligence is no use to you if you are afraid of testing it against the very challenges it would assist you in overcoming. To learn anything, to develop a capacity or expand an ability, you must risk seeming foolish. To grow into your potential as a person, you have to be comfortable with appearing ridiculous because that’s how you will seem to the people who see you making mistakes.
Making mistakes is necessary because mistakes themselves are apt to teach you lessons. If it is true that you don’t know French this will be apparent when you attempt to speak it because you will make a catalogue of errors. Assuming you learn from them, the more mistakes you make the closer you’ll get to fluency. All your mistakes do is reorient you with respect to where you stand in your journey to fluency. They tell you exactly what needs work and what needs to change if you are to make progress toward your destination. Consequently, it would be counterproductive to shy away from making mistakes. Rather we must seek them out because they hold within them an opportunity for learning that we would do well to heed and take advantage of in pursuit of our goal.
Taking self-development seriously requires that you cease caring about impressing others. Often doing the thing that will help you to improve will make you seem ridiculous. To learn you have to be willing to make a fool of yourself, to go through a process of trial and error, correcting your mistakes as you improve. No one’s approval should matter more to you than your own personal growth. Don’t let a concern for the impression you are making get in the way of your progress. You lose everything in seeking to gain the esteem of others, they have already sacrificed their futures for acceptance.
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