Few Years ago when I helped ERP system implementation in my previous company I did tons of mistakes. By that time I always wanted to have second chances so that I could avoid to make mistakes. Now, I am sure that the ERP system still has a lot of errors, but I don’t care it anymore…
Seeing with Magnifying Glass
Sometimes we tend to magnify our failure / mistakes / wrongdoings unreasonably.
My current boss, who worked in a well-known ibank before, took a shot to start his own business with his partner few years ago. The days were not good and he couldn’t run the company as good as he wanted. Eventually he failed and lost HK$ 10m in total with his partner.
That was a serious mistake in his life, but he didn’t give up on his entrepreneur road. He spent a lot of time studying the root cause of his failure, and looked for new ideas for his next business. One year later, he established his next company (the one I am working in now) and it is expanding in a good shape.
When I first heard of his lost of HK$ 10m from his last business, I was shocked. I couldn’t imagine how rich he was before, and how bad this failure affected his life. However, he didn’t say that in a sad tone but rather a relax tone, just like he didn’t feel anything about his big failure.
In fact, that is not unexpected. Most of the mistakes in our life are not as serious as we thought.
We are just one of the human beings in this world
Yes, we are the leading characters of our own lives, but that is just because we can only see this world in our own angle. In fact, we are only some tiny little creatures who can easily be killed by sharpen tools, or dead in several years.
A few people might have done something big that impact the whole human history at certain point, but most of us don’t have any impact to the world, not with our “success” or “failures”.
Of course my boss has lost HK$ 10m in his last business, but no one would care about this failure (someone might care back then, but not now) anymore, not to mention he is on fire now on his entrepreneur road.
Of course I might have done so many mistakes back then when I was responsible for the ERP system implementation, but that didn’t cause any death of anyone, or affected the operation of my previous company, and now it still run smoothly in certain extent (with a lot of other errors).
My point is that we always see our failure / mistakes / wrongdoings so big that we might think the world is going to be destroyed because of us. Hence, we are so regret and always want to give up on the coming challenges. We don’t want to take any difficult works anymore so that we won’t have chance to blame ourselves again.
THAT IS TOTALLY WRONG.
Learning From Failure Rather Than Giving Up
Most of the time Failure itself is not scary; what scary is our mindset towards failure. We always think of failure as a scary monster which should be avoid as much as possible, and always magnify it when it’s not a big deal actually.
When I worked in previous company, I encountered a lot of unreasonable deadlines. While I was questioning about the motive of setting tight deadlines (maybe the management wanted to push the staff to their limits), I was trying my best, without any choices, to complete the works assigned.
My former boss always told me not to care about the deadlines because no one is going to die if we couldn’t meet the deadlines. “Meeting deadlines is important, “my former boss said, “but they don’t mean the world to us. It is only deadlines.”
Once we learn how to see our failure / mistakes / wrongdoings normally, we will not be afraid of them or the consequences anymore. Rather, we will try to analyse the reasons behind, and are willing to learn from them.
By doing so, we an become the successful people we have been long for.
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If you want to know more about what I have learnt from other successful people, you can click the below link. This could the one of the life-changing articles for you:
