by Father Edward Garesché, Catholic Book of Character and Success
The one who knows how to profit by his own errors is the one who makes a success of life.
To be discouraged over your mistakes is foolish. To disregard them is equally unwise. To face them fearlessly and try to learn from them how to avoid a mistake next time is the part of wisdom.
When one begins any important task, he ought to watch carefully so as to avoid the errors that he has made in the past. He ought to learn from every new error how to diminish his mistakes in the future.
There are many classes of persons on life’s highway with whom you must rub elbows as you go. Some of them are dullards who care for nothing, notice nothing, and keep on making one mistake after another. You should not imitate them or fall into their company.
Others are dogged, self-sufficient persons who insist they are right, even when they are wrong, wishing not even to admit their errors, much less to profit by them. These people also, and their methods, you ought to avoid.
There are also the discouraged people who plod along, beaten and weary. They have admitted to themselves that life is a failure, that their mistakes have overwhelmed them. Far from learning from their errors, they have lain down under the burden of their own weakness. You should avoid also following the example of these people, who fail in life for want of courage and wisdom.
Then there are the wise, brave folk, who never let a mistake pass unnoticed or uncorrected, but who use each error as a means of avoiding similar errors in the future.
These men and women learn more from their mistakes than from their successes. They keep a constant watch on themselves without discouragement, without foolish fear, trying always to see themselves and their work as they are, admitting their own shortcomings and guarding against them, satisfied with partly succeeding in avoiding the mistakes of today by remembering the mistakes of yesterday, and using the mistakes of today to make the work of tomorrow a little more excellent, in the sight of God and man.
These latter people are the ones who really make the most of life’s opportunities, who are worthy citizens, who are good friends, who keep their spirits sweet and unspoiled even in the midst of life’s inevitable disappointments.
Errors do not discourage them, do not make them desperate, and do not leave them as ignorant and as careless as before. But they learn constantly in the hard but efficacious school of experience, and day after day, year after year, they grow wiser, better, and more dependable, by means of observing and correcting the faults and errors of the past.
It requires plenty of real courage and honesty to be sincere with oneself. There are many men and women who, their whole lives long, are afraid to stand face-to-face with their own mistakes and with the defects of their own character.
They deceive themselves about themselves. They actually contrive, in spite of daily experience, to remain blind to their faults and shortcomings.
A most dangerous deception is self-deception. It is only by seeing ourselves as we are that we can remake and perfect our own character. Those who are afraid to acknowledge their errors, who shirk from confessing even to themselves that they have been wrong and that they have defects, will hardly grow any better.
Young people in particular ought to try to acquire, from their first beginnings in the rude ways of life, the habit of sincerity and frankness in judging their own character and their own deeds. You can learn a great deal from others about your own character, especially about its weak places and the errors that you commit, and this is very valuable information.
When you make others angry by your faults, they are likely, in the moment of anger, to give you splendid criticism, which is the frank expression of their shrewd observation about you.
In their calmer moments, many people will never trouble to admonish you. In fact, they would shrink from telling you just what they think about you, because they fear to give you pain. But when one of your defects has angered them, the moment of irritation overcomes their reticence, and they blurt out just what they think of you, frankly and without disguise.
Now, just as you can judge of others much more shrewdly and correctly than you can judge of yourself, so others can judge of you better than they can recognize their own defects and shortcomings. What they say about you frankly, in moments of irritation, may not be quite true, but it is usually very illuminating.
Never grow discouraged at such unfavorable comments. You may often say to yourself that they are excessive and motivated by anger. Therefore, you may not be so bad as your angry friend may indicate. But there is usually a grain of truth even in the midst of their vexed exaggeration. As a blow with steel strikes fire out of flint, so the sharp touch of anger sometimes strikes truth out of a heart.
At all events, these criticisms that others pass on you are worth considering and studying. If, after thinking over the sharp words said to you, you honestly judge that there was no truth in them at all, you may well disregard them.
But if you find that, even though they were intemperate, still there was some basis of fact in the criticism, profit by it. Any light shed on your character and its defects, from whatever source it comes, ought to be welcome, provided it is true and honest light.
A good thing to remember for real success in life is not to keep your self-love unwounded and preserve an excessive good opinion of yourself, but rather to see yourself as you really are, so that you may profit by your errors to improve your character.
If you acknowledge your mistakes and learn by them, by that very fact the errors will be atoned for and will no longer be a subject of regret and shame. The defects in your character that are admitted and corrected will be a source of credit to you.
But the errors that you deny and gloss over and fail to profit by, or atone for, will someday, sooner or later, rise up to vex and shame you. To err is human and everyone makes some mistakes, but by learning from our mistakes, we cooperate with God in building up a noble character.
“You are the ones who teach your children. Teach them by your example, for children learn more from what they see than from what they hear.”
— St. John Bosco
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