You are your mistakes. Or Are you?

 

On my way to school today, an interesting piece of street art caught my eye. Apart from the fact that it was really good art, I don’t remember much about what was actually drawn on it. Instead, what I want to talk about is the caption on it, “You are not your mistakes”. At first glance, I agreed with it. I inferred that artist was trying to tell us that mistakes don’t define us. It tried to convey the idea that we should move on with our lives and not dwell on our mistakes. A simple recipe to a happy life. I had no issues with it.

I passed the exhibit and got onto my train. Having the time to think about what I had seen, my opinion on the quote changed. I thought to myself, “aren’t all of us defined by the mistakes we make?”. If no one ever made any mistakes, will we ever really learn anything? Not every choice we make in life is the right one, some choices result in a less than favorable situation. These situations teach us something, make us stronger or can even change our perspective on how we see things. Does this not make us the product of our mistakes?

Now I understand that the paragraph above roughly explains my thought process, so I will try to make my reasoning clearer with an example.

Meet Person A, a student who is studying for an exam they have tomorrow. A happens to be a lazy person who tends to take the easier way out of any situation. Being who they are, A decides to skip the last 3 chapters of their book claiming it won’t be tested. Surprise Surprise, a large part of the test was from the part A did not study. Not much of a surprise, A bombed. Hard.

In the example above, A made a choice, result was less than favorable. We can say A made a mistake. Because he failed the test because he did not cover all the chapters, he was taught an important lesson for the next test he writes. This brings me to my original argument. Our mistakes define us by teaching us lessons to make us stronger. In our case, A’s mistake of not studying the entire syllabus defined him by changing part of his personality and his perspective on exams.

While writing the explanation of the example, I realized something. While I don’t completely agree with the quote on the street art I saw this morning, I could find some sort of compromise. If A beat themselves over their mistake, they would never be able to move on from and truly learn from their mistake. So, the important thing here would be to learn from your mistakes and move on. So while you are still defined by your mistakes, it can be narrowed down to saying “you are the product of the result of your mistakes”. Its pretty long and hard to roll of the tongue, so you can say that “you are the product of your mistakes”.

in conclusion, I would say that while your mistakes do define who you are, its wrong to dwell on them. The important part of doing anything is to learn something from it and move on. So while I do agree with what the street art said this morning, I had did have a small disagreement with it which I penned down here. Hope you enjoyed it!