We all make mistakes, and this week I made a couple. Not too terrible for five days, I suppose. And those are probably the only two I am aware of. I tried on a pair of totally impractical shoes, twisted my ankle, and wound up with a hairline fracture of my left foot and one of those big Frankensteinian black boots. Then, this morning, I sent out an e-mail to thousands of people with a silly typo. To err is human. I must be super-human this week.
Our professional and personal lives are filled with face-plants, typos, and other forms of glitches and goofs.
I've blogged about mistakes in the past, and now seems like a good time for a reprise. Long before we had keyboards and touch screens, we had manual typewriters and were forced to "re-type" our errors in order to correct them -- with Liquid Paper, eraser pencils, and white-out tape. It was a good era in many ways, because we needed to stare at our errors and re-do them.
Reflecting on what we did wrong, how it happened, and fixing the problem (privately or publicly) is always a good exercise -- whether we're erasing, whiting-out, backspacing, or simply ruminating and apologizing.
I will be more cautious now before I hit "send." Once I heal, I will spend the rest of the summer in flat shoes. I will slow down a little and limit my multi-tasking. I will end this week a little wiser and a bit more humble.
Spell-check is fallible. Human bones are breakable. And apologies and foregiveness are timeless -- in life and in business.
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Great advice from my late father about failure