How to Turn Mistakes and Failure into Gold
Have you ever heard the tale of Rumpelstiltzkin, how he helped a poor miller’s daughter spin straw into gold and eventually marry and bear the child of the king?
Did you know that all of us have straw heaped around us that we can spin into our own gold?
Let me tell you a story….
The Tale of Janna’s Difficult Week
Once upon a time, there lived a wife and mother who worked very hard at three jobs. She took a vacation at the beginning of July, and when she returned home the following week, she decided to work extra hard to make up for the time she had spent relaxing.
On Monday and Tuesday, she felt like a super-hero. She wrote documents. Sent emails. Reviewed spreadsheets. Had phone calls. Updated websites. Processed images. Posted on social media.
She went to bed on Tuesday night, but at the stroke of midnight, a hobgoblin woke her up, sent her brain into overdrive, and prevented her from falling asleep again.
On Wednesday, the poor woman was very, very tired, but she was an over-achiever, so she pushed herself through the day and completed her “To Do” list. On Thursday she did the same.
On Friday, the woman was exhausted. She felt like she was shaking (but maybe it was the cup of iced tea that she drank). But still, she completed her work and baked cupcakes with her children in the evening.
The next day was Saturday, the day of rest. But this woman couldn’t resist taking a peek at her email, and in the course of scrolling through her messages, she realized that she had made a mistake on Monday, put a document in the wrong place, and accidentally missed a deadline.
Now the poor woman started to shed piteous tears.
“Woe is me!” she thought. “This is the second time I’ve made that mistake! I’m a failure!”
She cried and cried, and then she dried her tears, took a deep sigh, and started folding laundry.
While she was folding laundry, the hobgoblin appeared again, and whispered in her ear, “You should listen to a podcast about failure.”
“Hmmm…” she thought. “Good idea!”
So she listened to a podcast about failure. The host was a fairy godmother named Brooke Castillo. As the magical fairy godmother talked, the woman started to calm down.
In fact, she became very calm… and then happy!
That’s because the fairy godmother gave the woman a magical recipe for spinning mistakes into gold.
As soon as she was done folding laundry, the woman jumped up, used the magical recipe, and turned her mistake into gold.
“It works!” she exclaimed.
The Magical Recipe for Spinning Mistakes Into Gold
Here’s what the woman heard the fairy godmother say:
“When something happens that doesn’t meet our expectations, we get to decide what that means…. We can decide to make it mean something positive.”
When you make a mistake, the fairy godmother explained, say to yourself:
“I’m going to have my own back. I’m going to use that failure as an opportunity to learn and get better.”
And then the fairy godmother mentioned an idea she’d gotten from an impish type named Ramit Sethi.
Ramit, she said, has a Failure Log, where he strives to include at least five failures a month.
Why?
Because there is no faster way to improve than to:
- try new things
- make mistakes
- examine those mistakes
- decide how to do things differently
- do the whole process over and over again
The problem is that many of us keep making the same mistakes over and over again because we don’t force ourselves to stop, write them down, and reflect on them.
That’s the genius of Ramit Sethi’s Failure Log.
Not only is it a simple way to remind yourself to reflect constructively on your failures; it is also a way to make you excited to fail — because then you meet your quota of 5 failures a month!
