Learn and Embrace Your Mistakes

I remember a day in when I was younger that changed my life. For good or worse, I wasn’t sure at the time… We just got promoted to writing with pens instead of pencils and I was so excited. After about a month or so, I had a mathematics test and during this test I made so many mistakes. Each time I made an error, I got a ruler and crossed it out, I then either wrote besides the cancelled text or over it.

Finally, I handed in my paper when I was done answering. It turned out that though my final answer was correct, my teacher rejected my paper and gave me an ‘F’ because of how ‘untidy’ my work was. From then on, I always wrote my tests and homework in pencil first, writing over it in pen only after I was certain or satisfied with my answer. This meant having to answer each question twice within a short period of time.

Years later, I realized how frustrating and time consuming this process became. Especially when I was given a very short period of time to solve a problem. Slowly but surely, I would write certain answers directly in pen. Before I knew it, I was solving entire problems in pen. Of course, I would make mistakes here and there, but the more comfortable I got writing in pen, the less mistakes I made. I guess rather than completely turn to writing in pencil again earlier on, I should have continued writing in pen despite my mistakes. I now know that with time, I would have made less mistakes and my work would have gotten much tidier.

Though it’s not much. I guess this reflects the way we can handle a mistake wrongly. At times we may be hard and unforgiving of ourselves. But lets make those mistakes, and learn/grow from them because how we handle one error might determine how we will go about the next one. should simple own up and learn from them.