There are no mistakes, only lessons.

The next rule in The Rules for being Human.

Rule No. 3 There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial, error and experimentation. We learn as much from failure as we can from success. Maybe more.

There are no mistakes? Well I am here to confess that I have made a few, yes OK more than a few. In my understanding of life, there is no way to live it perfectly and we all stuff up somewhere along the line. We make decisions on the knowledge and information we have at the time and this is often flawed; imperfect. Sometimes we reject good advice and sound counsel and sometimes we have to learn the hard way.

The trick is to transform mistakes into lessons and in doing so, we transform ourselves. Often we can look back and think, You know what? I would not have missed that for anything; the lessons learnt are so valuable. There is always a lesson (remember that is Rule No.2) and wise people will look for the lesson and make application.

Failure is not a dirty word; I love the acronym for Fail First Attempt At Learning! So don’t stop after the first attempt those who succeed in life at anything are often not the best, particularly when they begin, but they just keep on going and in the process improve and succeed.

And when you have stuffed up big time, remember there is this wonderful thing called forgiveness. Forgiveness gives us a new clean slate and we can start again this time a little wiser. We can ask for forgiveness from others, we can forgive others and most important of all, we can forgive ourselves.