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Life is messy. Careers are messy. Since you can’t shift the messy nature of our world, you only have one logical choice: shift your mindset. Learn to cherish your mistakes as:
Learning experiencesReminders to stay humbleOpportunities to accidentally stumble on a better ideaWays to understand the depth of your inexperience
The wisest and most experienced people I know often have less confidence in their predictions than anyone else. This is not because they have grown infirm. To the contrary, they simply have enough life experience to understand that there a very real limits to our understanding. In short, they are experienced enough to start understanding the depths of what they don’t know.
A few years ago, the Executive Director of her YWCA asked Sarah Elkins to sing at their annual breakfast fundraiser. She wasn't particularly experienced yet as a performer, and only agreed after her husband offered to accompany her on his acoustic guitar.
The performance was scheduled at 8:30 a.m., too early for Sarah to warm up much in advance, especially since she’s anything but a morning person.
She also used the venue's sound system instead of their own, and the guitar's amplification went in and out, making it sound to Sarah like she was sometimes singing unaccompanied. It didn’t help that she was “so nervous that I could feel my knee caps jogging inside my skin”.
Sarah thought it was a failure, especially when her husband said, “It was okay."
(Ugh. I know what that feels like. When my wife says something was “fine”, it really means big trouble lies just beyond the horizon.)
A few months before the next year's event, Sarah reached out to the executive director and asked if she could perform again, to redeem herself from the previous year.
The director was puzzled; she thought the event had gone well.
So what are the lessons here? With more experience, Sarah would have done in her first performance what she did in her second, which was to work with two other female vocalists and perform unaccompanied and using their own sound system.
But—and this is important to my theme of cutting yourself a break—she also could have escaped a year of regret by actually getting honest feedback from her “client”... instead of simply assuming that the event was a failure
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