Sunday, February 8, 2009

Make Your Day -- Make a Mistake!

If you've had the courage to look at your stock portfolio lately, I'm guessing the thought has crossed your mind, "...if only I had sold XRY when it was...blah blah blah." Mixonian has only one thing to say: Get over it and move on.

Risk is part of life, it's better to risk and "fail" from time to time, than spend your limited time on this planet on the sidelines looking in.

It's not that your goal is to make a mistake; you're certainly going to do so in any case. What I want to share with you is important: your fear of making a mistake is a much bigger mistake!

You've probably heard that Thomas Edison tried 10,000 different materials before finding the right one to make the light bulb. Well, that's 9,999 mistakes on ONE SINGLE project. If he had been working for anyone other than himself, he may well have been fired after the first 100 tries.

It's not making a mistake that brings you down, it's how long it takes you to recover that wastes so much time.

It's not what happens to you that makes your life, it's how you react to what happens to you that defines you.

Last week my dear students gave impromptu speeches and did a bang-up job. But some of them let themselves get paralyzed by the fear of making a mistake. Or a few would make some small blunder, and then apologize, which only distracted the audience from their message. much more so than the mistake that most people didn't even notice.

Mixonian mindset vitamin for today: Making mistakes means I'm a player. I learn and move on.