Mindworks: An Introduction to NLP: The Secrets of Your Mind Revealed by Linden Anne

Author:Linden, Anne [Anne Linden]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781845903435
Publisher: Crown House Publishing
Published: 2011-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 30

What Is Failure? What Is Feedback?

A person without a problem

is like a warrior with a broken sword.

SIT BACK. Relax. Take a deep breath.

Allow yourself to daydream.

Think of some mistakes you’ve made. Now look at your whole life up to this point and try to imagine what it would have been like if you hadn’t made those mistakes.

Think of the positive things that would not have happened if you hadn’t made those mistakes.

Take a few minutes to recognize the opportunities these mistakes provided and all that you learned and gained because of them.

Failure includes mistakes. Failure means not achieving the outcome you intended, because of some miscalculation on your part, because something you couldn’t foresee or control made it backfire, because the timing was off, or because of any number of reasonable or unreasonable causes that make things go wrong. You didn’t get what you wanted.

Or you got what you wanted—the job, marriage, a long-awaited trip—but it turned out not to be what you’d expected. Things happen; people are not trees (they can move despite having roots), and what was or used to be will change as the person grows and develops.

Life happens. Failure happens. People make mistakes. They say the wrong thing, fall in love with the wrong people, fight battles they later wish they’d never heard of.

But each mistake is a possibility. Jeannette marries Bob and moves to Australia. Five years later she sees it was a mistake, Bob isn’t the person for her, they can barely speak to each other without getting into an argument, but Jeannette has found a wonderful job there, which has led to a new career she loves. If she hadn’t made her “mistake” (Bob), she might never have discovered her talents and satisfactions down under.

Someone else makes a career choice that turns into a dead end—he’s a specialized technician with a large corporation that seemed to specialize in nothing so much as downsizing—but he meets the person who becomes the love of his life.

How often has this happened to you or to people you know? Missing a train, walking into the wrong room, saying something you didn’t mean to say: These are the trivial mistakes of everyday life that open up new opportunities. You take the wrong road—and find undiscovered country, a beautiful setting for something you have in mind, a picnic, a wedding, a scene in a play you’re writing.

You go to one of those multiplex theaters and buy a ticket to the wrong movie—which turns out to be the best thing you’ve seen in years, and helpful too.

Mistakes are like tiny time warps, a little hiatus in the usual routine, an interruption of the automatic cycle of A → B. A mistake is a new response, and it can provide a new outlook. It can give you a new approach, open up new possibilities, show you a hidden territory you’ve stumbled on by accident.

Bill Gates, the fabulously wealthy founder of Microsoft, got his start by being fired. The discovery of penicillin came about by mistake.

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