The Liberating Power of Embracing Mistakes and Taking Risks
When I first took on this globe trotting heralding answering the call to adventure, I knew I was in for quite the oddysey. I'm not surprised that after a year outside the United States of America -my home country- I can honestly say that I have been able to learn quite a bit. Not just when it comes to traveling but in the differences, both inside and out, in cultures, backgrounds, languages, and even social dynamics at play. It's safe to say you really can't not learn something when you're exposed to The Unknown for so long so frequently in so many ways.
That being said, I want to share with you one of the biggest lessons, if not the biggest, that I've been able to really absorb into my bones. This isn't a lesson you can get by staying at home sitting on your butt doing nothing but playing video games. You've got to really put yourself in the fire to get this, and not just get it on an intellectual level but inside of you at the deepest levels be able to fundamentally feel it on the inside.
The lesson is simple. "Embrace Making Mistakes." You see, when I first took on what I call Following Your Art, I knew I wouldn't have it all figured out right away. After all, all the traveling I had ever done had been with the military. You get told what to do and where to be even given checklists to ensure everything you need to get done gets done. But going off on your own requires a certain resilience. A resistance to the desire to turn back. Once you're on the journey, there are points of no return.
However, when you do return to some countries, you aren't the same when you get back. You will have changed and you handle things differently. Some of the mistakes I made before I am now incapable of making while other mistakes, I'm just incapable of seeing in the same light and handling in the same way as I did before. My point is that making mistakes gives you lessons you can't get by someone telling you what not to do and/or what to do instead. It's the realization that in making mistakes, you evolve. Maybe eventually you begin to see that the trial and error of experimentation with what you don't know based on theory and hypothesizing simply and naturally enables you to intuitively notice what works and what doesn't now.
And in so doing, without coming off as too cliche, you get the experience and the experience of all those mistakes becoming the stepping stones that got you to where you are begin to give way to a new grasp of what's really possible. You've gotten back to where the journey started but this time, the old mistakes you made fade away while new opportunities, possibilities, and openings begin to reveal themselves to you. The mistakes you make now can shift and change what the future holds so long as you embrace those mistakes in a way that lets you feed forward what you didn't know was possible all along but only now makes itself known to you by virtue of how you see those mistakes and the outcomes that come about as a result.
Got it? Just embrace it. And see what happens on the other side of everything you don't yet know anything about but that calls you forward into a future worth remembering.
