According to Albert Einstein, “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” This is indeed realistic. A child learns to walk after making several mistakes in the course of learning. It is obvious that an innovation is only possible after several trials and errors. To create something new entails several experiments. So mistakes can be a silver lining. However, repeating them again and again and not learning from your own mistakes might be disastrous.

We all make mistakes, no matter how perfect we think we are. Most of our mistakes go unnoticed and we don’t learn from them. In this regard, Mahatma Gandhi’s words are insightful: “Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.” In fact, making a mistake is a learning process. We learn by doing and do by learning. In the course of doing something, we make mistakes. The sharpness in an iron comes only after hammering it several times. In the process of learning, mistakes are common. The cliché “practice makes a man perfect” seems to be more relevant to understand why mistakes lead to accomplishment of success. Mistakes determine our achievement. If the rate of making mistakes is lower, we have not done more work, and it may affect our future results too.

Mistakes usually cause some degree of pain, loss, or struggle. Certainly we might agree that we don’t care for the consequences, and hence we call it a mistake. The irony is that these events that we try so hard to avoid are sometimes precisely what we need to experience. Ordinarily, growth doesn’t occur without some of those challenging feelings we try so hard to avoid.

Indeed, mistakes are the portal of discovery. While inventing a new substance, scientists make many mistakes. Pilots, doctors, scientists and such other great people discover something unexplored and something innovative at the cost of making several, at times innumerable, mistakes in their life. The world-famous inventor Thomas Alva Edison aptly says, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

In a nutshell, making mistakes is a learning process. I agree with George Bernard Shaw as he is of the opinion that success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time. The essences of making mistakes can be wrapped in one inspiring quote of Joe Abercrombie – “I have learned all kinds of things from my many mistakes. The one thing I never learn is to stop making them.”