Mistakes.

I am thankful for mistakes.

I was up to bat. Luckily for my team, it was knowledge of French grammar that was requisite to win, rather than physical prowess. I had a death grip on the buzzer, ready to signal my intelligence. “What is the vous conjugation of faire?” my professor asked. I slammed the buzzer. “Fairez!” I yelled. She gave me a disappointed look and said, “Sorry, no.” My face flushed. I assumed I’d misunderstood the question: all vous conjugations end in –ez, right? Obviously. But in fact, when I opened my textbook to confirm my correctness, vous faîtes stared me in the face. “Well, crap,” I thought dejectedly. But on the exam the following day, I didn’t miss a single question using faire.

You probably have a story like this as well: you missed the mark somewhere, got something all wrong, but you gained valuable knowledge or wisdom. That’s what I love about mistakes: when you start making them, you start learning. C.S. Lewis, whose work I admire greatly, once wrote, “Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn. My God, do you learn.” In the past few weeks, I have decided that there is really no shame in making a mistake. The only shame would be not learning from it. Mistakes, after all, are brilliant teachers.

Of course, some mistakes hurt. Some engender a blow to the confidence. Some are unspeakably costly. Some cause months or years of shame. But making them shows you weren’t afraid to jump in, to go after something. You were willing to do something risky. And after the fact, you became wiser. You got up and continued on—that is the stuff courage is made of. And if you did it right, you learned.


“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow.’” — Mary Anne Radmacher