Listen, what happened to those twelve publishing houses that at one time refused to print Harry Potter? In my opinion, they should have committed a public self-immolation, or at least taken a collective tonsure, so that they never showed themselves to the world. Never! Here is a mistake! Compared to it, everything else is a vegetarian error of self-education.
It is believed that only two people – a doctor and a judge – do not have the right to make a mistake. Therefore, if you are a doctor or a judge, mind your own business. All the rest together remember the work on the bugs. Could there be anything more boring and meaningless in life than rewriting a dictation into unstressed vowels or solving five identical problems in order to finally learn the rules of multiplication? Meanwhile, an error is a minus point. And then two. This is a spoiled mood, a humiliating insult, unfair doubts of the whole family in your perfection. This is a career failure, like the character in the movie “Joke”. (And this is another light version!) I knew one unfortunate woman who was so afraid of making a mistake in her final exam that she got on a train the night before and left for St. Petersburg. They searched for her for three days.
Farther. Painful puberty. Parents are vigilantly watching so that you do not make a mistake, as with a theater group – remember? Pasha went to sports and became a fine fellow. And you? Neither mind nor heart. The girl comes to you – not the same. It is obvious. You’ll see, this is the wrong choice. She will leave you. And so she quit. Went to Semyonov. What did we say? Everything. Now, for the next ten years, love is over. Everything else, as you might guess, will no longer be a mistake, but a crime. You choose between two projects. One annual, but foreign, the other is long-term, but at home. How not to make a mistake? Exhausted. Didn’t respond in time to either one. Left or left others. And so on until retirement, until you, like that poet at the vegetable stall, catch yourself thinking that you can’t even choose a watermelon. What, exactly, are we afraid of? Defeats? Punishments? That the watermelon will be rotten?
Read more:
- New mistakes according to Freud
We have been taught that we have to pay for mistakes. But now: attention! My recent insight: for the right choice – you will not believe – you also have to pay! My wonderful friend, from whom I write off a lot of all sorts of reasonable behaviors, admitted that she has two indisputable successes in life: her husband and emigration. She is really happy. In the country where she ended up with a wonderful husband in a long-term marriage. But the scenery of her apparent happiness is usually not discussed. Meanwhile, they are as follows: a sacrificed career (and a girlfriend is a person of extraordinary abilities), the provincial monotony of a small country and the sole concern for infirm parents, which the brothers and sisters who remained in their homeland cannot physically share. So – what is considered success, and what is a mistake?
Or another example. A familiar couple, having lived for ten years, gets divorced. Oh, she exclaims, this marriage was a mistake. The key word here was. Marriage was not a mistake – at the time of its conclusion, it was a sure holiday, a necessary condition for existence. Just ten years later, the project participants have changed. And for these already completely different people, the previous choice BECAME unacceptable. That is, the error – with the exception of the instantly opened watermelon and the wrong comma – is the result of critical analysis in a deferred perspective. It is almost impossible to guess its pole, because our attitude to the world is changing all the time. Just like ourselves. But isn’t this the main and most beautiful intrigue of life in general?
Commentary by psychologist Arman Bekenova
“Mistake” as a category, I would generally exclude from the rating scale of an adult. For a mature person, a mistake is really a grammatical failure in a letter, nothing more. In everything else, people deal with choice. Choice for us is a normal state. Another thing is how we use it. Mental health implies precisely variability – in contrast to mental illness, where a person is fixated on some one scenario or behavior pattern. The choice made, in turn, is a priori not a mistake – no matter how it looks from the outside. Why? Because independent, that is an adult, after thinking, makes the best, most useful and necessary decision for himself at this moment. But that doesn’t mean that everyone will like his decision.. This means that, having accepted it, a person will retain the basic things in himself – dignity and contact with the world (or he critically evaluates the victims on these flanks). The stronger the personality, the more original its choice. What we conditionally qualify in our lives as a mistake is, as a rule, the result of a dependent decision made under pressure. This situation is typical for children. And this is understandable. But in the adult world, there are plenty of such cases, because not all of us grow up as quickly as we would like. Thomas Edison famously screwed up 10 light bulbs before inventing his famous one. But he did not consider any such attempt a defeat. “I just found 10 ways that don’t work”. The scientist was convinced that these “breaks” would inevitably bring him closer to a constructive result. And I wasn’t wrong. And not because it’s Edison, not Vasechkin. But because any adult person, maneuvering, doubting and taking risks, never loses in any outcome – he only gains experience, responsibility and that same background, which, as they say, you can’t drink away.