I made a mistake. I made a mistake years ago. I made a big one a couple of month ago and I made one a week ago. And that’s absolutely fine. No! Actually, it is absolutely necessary. Yet, to say that to myself and to stop worrying about “doing something wrong” took some time. I graduated exactly 5 years ago, and one of my biggest worries was it to make mistakes.
One day, I came across a lecture by Robert L. Joss at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he gives some advice to students a few weeks before graduation. In fact, he shares 10 life lessons (the full lecture is here). And lesson 4 really caught my attention, which says that life is full of character building experiences.
Joss explains, that adults learn most of what they learn through experience. In particular, we learn the most when we have to acquire a skill or develop a behaviour that is necessary for us to accomplish something important for us. Here, we learn the most. And such experiences happen only when we get out of our comfort zone – when we have “character building experiences.” For instance, when we make the wrong business decision, hurt a person we love, or have an uncomfortable conversation with a hiring manager. The key is to learn from those experiences. We need to reflect on them, ideally with good and honest feedback from friends or colleagues. Simply ask yourself, what was this experience trying to teach me? Then learn from that and integrate it into who you are and hopefully grow. Change. And become a different person.
With that, may life be filled with “character building experiences” that make us grow!
