Missed Takes or Mistakes

Watch your dog playing in the yard, catching a Frisbee, or doing a new trick. If your dog misses a turn, a catch, or the new trick, what does your dog do? Does she blame herself? Think of herself as not good enough? Or does she take it again.

Do you ever play solitaire? You know, that card game that is on every computer?

Well, I was just playing solitaire, and five games in a row went south. As I finished the last unfinishable game, it struck me that there is a great lesson in this game for all of us.

Think back to when it was a real card game: you shuffled, you did what you could, if you lost and had time, you would shuffle again and once again do what you could. The computer version is not much different except you don’t have to shuffle and you can play more games in less time.

Do you ever get frustrated when you have a losing streak or a high when you have a winning streak? Do you ever blame the losses on yourself? Do you ever think that every game is winnable? Does that idea make you feel inept?

Probably not. We play on and on, losing or winning, maybe for the mindlessness of the game, or maybe for some real reason. Who knows? What we don’t do is point the finger at ourselves for our not winning, no matter how many times we replay the same hand. We know this is just a game, a game of chance, and what we don’t take wins or losses very seriously. Like our dogs, we do it again, or not.

But then we walk out into the world, if we do something wrong, or if we just do what we always do:often, if it doesn’t work, we blame ourselves.

A hand of cards or real life: what’s the difference? Even if we messed up in the card game, we really don’t blame ourselves: we deal another hand or we put the game up and come back and play it another time. We don’t blame ourselves. It is what it is.

So why do we blame ourselves in our daily lives? Why do we look at mistakes and blame ourselves for those mistakes?

Why don’t we do what Bill Thurston, a very wise CEO, taught me years ago. Bill told me that a mistake is nothing more than a missed take. Like a photographer, he said, we should take it again, and again, and again. No reason to blame ourselves. None at all: it is just about either taking it again or not, and that is up to us. Win or lose: It is just what it is. If it is a mistake, a missed take, take it again . . . if you want to.

This is something that should be taught to everyone when they first start school or home schooling. A mistake is just a missed take: you can always take it again. It in itself says nothing about us; all it says is that it may need to be redone a different way.