I once made a ‘mistake’, it cost me £7,000. I didn’t consider it a ‘mistake’, that was someone else’s word!The way you approach life determines whether you emerge as an optimist or a pessimist, a winner or a loser. Someone told me the other week that they needed to tell their child about life’s negatives so that they would be better prepared for ‘reality’. No, no, no I screamed! Children know no limits until adults fill their minds with constraints, limitations and diminished possibilities. As Henry Ford once put it, ‘whether you can or you can’t you’re right’.
The £7,000? It funded the print run of a brochure that never saw the light of day because the literature in question had a couple of mistakes in it. The client refused to pay the print bill but, because I had signed off on the print, I had to. The experience taught me to get proofs signed off and to not ‘assume’ that something would be right. I paid £7,000 for a lesson. It wasn’t a mistake. I’m an optimist, a winner, a go getter and that’s why it wasn’t a ‘mistake’. It was a learning experience.
Don’t let pessimists re-shape your thinking. Run from them for they are an irritation to the soul and you will never make them into optimists so don’t try. And please, don’t fill your child’s mind with ‘reality’, allow them to dream and they will change the world.