Dyson has a commercial where the inventor talks about the 5,000 prototypes they made before they found the right one. What they found was 5,000 ways not to make the cyclone cleaner! On try 5,001, they found the one way that worked. Was it futile to keep going back with one failure after another? Not at all, it was what he had to do to achieve his dream.

So many people give up their dreams because they face failure after failure after failure and they lose hope that success is out there for them. Maybe their goal needs changing, but maybe they just need to keep at it and keep believing they will find success in the end.

12 step has a saying “Don’t quit five minutes before the miracle.” This saying tells you that even though every step is difficult and you may have to go through them many times until you reach the goal of abstinence, if you keep on going you’ll get there. If you work and work and then stop, you’ll never know how close you were to the threshold of success. You’ll never know what you could have done had you kept on for a little while longer.

Both of these examples teach you about mistakes and how you can learn from them. As you make a mistake, it teaches you something not to do. That’s one less you have to try again. A smart person will take his or her mistakes and use them to propel him or herself to a better future. They know that mistakes happen; they understand this and don’t base their self-worth on it. They see mistakes and failures as a stepping-stone to something better.

Whether the mistake is a failure on your part or an accident, you have two choices. You can respond to it by using it to make better choices in the future, or you can choose to sit down and cry about it, wallowing in your self-pity. Those who eventually succeed are those who choose the first path. They stop and look at what happened. They evaluate what they did wrong and what they could do better next time. Then they get up and go on.

Those who choose the second path seldom succeed. They are the ones who develop “learned helplessness” and use their mistakes as an excuse not to venture out into the world. Maybe in doing this, they convince their ego that failure comes by trying so why try? Sadly, choosing this path leads to an even bigger failure: losing out on the life they could have had.

Just as a student makes many mistakes before learning the concepts they need to know, all people will fail sometimes and make mistakes. It’s part of the learning process. If you use your mistakes to change your future, you have done a good thing. If you sit on your mistakes and cry, you will go nowhere and you will go there alone.