“It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually.”
I fear we are programmed from a young age to fear making mistakes and looking stoopid.
“Aren’t you a clever boy/girl/tree!” is a bloody dangerous bit of praise, cos it makes you wanna play safe to get more, not risk falling into failure.
“Man who never made a mistake, never made anything”, often misattributed to Albert Einstein, but that should be the enculturation from an early age.
We are formed early on, “Give me the boy till he is 5/7, and I’ll show you the man” as Aristotle or the Jesuits coined, is very true. And it is hard to break that programming, even when we are aware it is detrimental to us.
Photo by Meg Jenson on Unsplash
Leave a Reply