“I have learned more from my mistakes than my successes.” Sir Humphrey Davy.
Professor Donna Strickland from Canada has become the first woman in 55 years to win the Nobel Prize in Physics. Previous females to win the award were Marie Curie in 1903 and Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963. Along with Arthur Ashkin and Gérard Mourou, Professor Strickland was honoured for “ground-breaking inventions in laser physics.”
Few of us who have heard about people being awarded a Nobel Prize realise that the various prizes came about due to the error of a journalist. By his simple mistake, he changed another man’s life forever. It also led to lots of people being recognised for their positive contributions to society.
The story about Alfred Nobel and how someone’s error altered the destiny of his life is an interesting one. It illustrates that something positive can come from a mistake.
Alfred Nobel was one of the most successful entrepreneurs of the nineteenth century. In 1867 he patented his new explosive “dynamite.” By 1880 he was head of one of the largest dynamite producing cartels in the world and generated lots of money.
One day a simple mistake had a significant impact on him.
A French newspaper confused the death of Nobel’s brother Ludvig, with his own. Alfred got the opportunity to do what people don’t get the chance to do; he read his own obituary. He saw what people had made of his life. He read phrases like “Merchant of death” and “That his fortune was amassed finding new ways to mutilate and kill”.
As Nobel held the newspaper in his hands, he concluded this wasn’t how he wanted to be remembered. He decided on that day, his life wouldn’t just be successful but significant. He began using his vast wealth to encourage the arts, science and above all peace.
People tend to be very hard on themselves when they make a mistake. It’s important to remember that our mistakes don’t define us as a person, unless we let them. They are just a snapshot of our life. We are much more than our challenges or past mistakes.
When we make a mistake and we choose to be hard on our self it can have a detrimental effect on our mood and happiness levels. It can lead us to procrastinate on taking further action for fear of making another error. Sadly, some people don’t achieve all that they could in life because they become paralysed by the fear of making the same mistake or experiencing failure.
Thomas Edison didn’t see his 10,000 attempts to invent a light bulb as failures. He saw them as discoveries of ways that didn’t work and moved him closer to a solution. With such a positive mindset he was able to persevere when things didn’t work. Eventually he achieved his first successful test of the bulb on October 22 1879.
When things go wrong in life, as they inevitably will at some point, rather than feel sorry for our self and procrastinate we can choose to learn lessons from the situation by asking the question “What is this teaching me?”
We can then remind our self that we are only human, let the mistake go as soon as possible and apply the wisdom of the lesson to our future actions.
This week why not take a few moments to reflect and consider if there are any challenges or mistakes that you need to learn from and then let go of.
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