Recently I was watching a football match and the referee made a mistake. 

A player handled the ball deliberately to prevent a goal being scored by the opposing team. This is a sending off offence. Unfortunately in the heat of the moment the referee confused the identity of the culprit and sent the wrong player off the field of play. It caused a big fuss in the media.  I read in the newspaper the next day that the referee was devastated by his mistake. 

It reminded me of a story I once read about Alfred Nobel and how a mistake changed the destiny of his life.

Alfred Nobel was one of the most successful entrepreneurs of the nineteenth century. In 1867 he patented his new explosive –“dynamite”. Soon he had patents in every industrialised country. By 1880 he was head of one of the largest dynamite producing cartel in the world. Royalties, dividends and profits grew. And then one day a simple mistake changed his life forever.

A French newspaper confused the death of Nobel’s brother Ludvig, with his own. Alfred got the opportunity to do what many of us would love to do – he read his own obituary and saw what people had made of his life. But 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 vowed that this was not how he should be remembered, and he decided that, from that very day, his life would not just be successful but significant.

He began using his vast wealth to encourage the arts, science and above all peace. Few who watched as Nelson Mandella walked up to the podium in 1995 to collect the Nobel Peace Prize realised that the event was due to the error of a journalist who, by his simple mistake, changed another man’s life forever.

This week have a think about if there is anything new that you would like to do and figure out your first step in making it a reality.

Quote for the week – “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new” Albert Einstein.

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