(Unknown)    

As I was cleaning out my files the other day, I came across a story I just love. A very well known scientist who had achieved remarkable medical breakthroughs, was being interviewed by a journalist who asked him what he thought made him different from the other scientists all of whom were equally brilliant, well trained and experienced, yet who didn’t have the same success as he. The reporter asked, “How was it that he was the one who consistently made medical breakthroughs?”


The scientist thought for a moment and responded that he thought it all went back to when he was a very small child. One day he was trying to take a bottle of milk from the refrigerator and his little hands lost his grip and the entire contents poured out on to the floor. Instead of his mother getting mad at him, she instead said, “Oh my, what a wonderful mess you have made! I can’t remember when I ever saw such a huge puddle of milk!  Now that it’s done, would you like to play in it before we clean it up?”
And so instead of feeling horrible about the “mistake” he had made, the little boy experienced the “catastrophe” as something positive.  After a short while, his mother then said, “Now when we make a mess like this, eventually we have to clean it up so what would you like to use, a towel, a mop or a sponge?”
After they had cleaned it up, his mother said, “Now what we have here is a failed experiment of how to take a big bottle of milk out of the refrigerator with two little hands. So now let’s go outside and fill up the bottle with water and let’s experiment and see if you can figure out how to carry it without dropping it.” And so they did.
What a great lesson. The scientist learned at that moment that mistakes were a natural part of the learning process and that you should never be afraid of making mistakes. Later in life he transferred that awareness to his experiments and while other scientists were spending time being careful to never fail or were justifying their mistakes, he was busy doing more experiments never worrying about getting them “right”. These continuous experiments eventually led to extraordinary medical breakthroughs that saved thousands of lives.
(Oh, to have just one more chance to parent…)

(Or do life again… or to live my dreams… DO IT NOW!)