Most of us feel bad when we make mistakes, beat ourselves up about it, feel like failures, get mad at ourselves.
And that's only natural: most of us have been taught from a young age that mistakes are bad, that we should try to avoid mistakes. We've been scolded when we make mistakes - at home, school and work. Maybe not always, but probably enough times to make feeling bad about mistakes an unconscious reaction.
Yet without mistakes, we could not learn or grow.
If you think about it that way, mistakes should be cherished and celebrated for being one of the most amazing things in the world: they make learning possible, they make growth and improvement possible.
By trial and error - trying things, making mistakes, and learning from those mistakes - we have figured out how to make electric light, to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, to fly.
Mistakes make walking possible for the smallest toddler, make speech possible, make works of genius possible.
Think about how we learn: we don't just consume information about something and instantly know it or know how to do it. You don't just read about painting, or writing, or computer programming, or baking, or playing the piano, and know how to do them right away.
