Mistakes Equal Success

This weeks quote of the week comes from a book I have previously talked about by Paul Arden It's Not How Good You Are, Its How Good You Want to Be: The World's Best Selling Book. I think when it comes to every aspects of life we can learn a great deal through our mistakes. Matter of fact how can you become extraordinary if you never make mistakes? I make mistakes everyday and from each of those mistakes I learn something. A majority of the bloggers in the Personal Finance community have some story of how the mistakes they made as young adults helped them turn around their life and ultimately their finances. 

The following is an excerpts from It's Not How Good You Are, Its How Good You Want to Be:© Copyright, 2003, by Paul Arden.

"The Person Who Doesn't Make Mistakes Is Unlikely To Make Anything" 

Benjamin Franklin said "I haven't failed, I've have had 10,000 ideas that didn't work."

Thomas Edison said "Of the 200 light bulbs that didn't work, every failure told me something I was able to incorporate into the next attempt."

Theatre Director Joan Littlewood said, "If we don't get lost, we we'll never find a new route."

All of them understood that failures and false starts are a precondition of success.

Failure was a major contributor to its success. 

This is some pretty powerful stuff, you learn and progress everyday by trying and making mistakes. When I first started budgeting I was constantly making adjustments to it because the first, second, third... ways weren't working for me. I am still making adjustments everyday to this blog. I constantly look at my site stats to see what is working and what is not. Which articles are people reading and which articles people seem to care less about. 

I have made my fair share of mistakes as well with personal finances and I know there will be plenty more mistakes along the way which I can point out and we can all learn.

I was reading the blog I Hope To Retire Someday and his latest post is about a mistake assuming someone was monitoring his retirement/investment. In the long run I think he will be better off because he will have learned from that mistake.

You have to learn from your mistakes though, as Albert Einstein said:

There is nothing that is a more certain sign of insanity than to do the same thing over and over and expect the results to be different.*

I think we as individuals and the government can learn from all these guys. Making mistakes is part of human nature, but understanding that they are a precondition of success is the importance of failure.

*Why is our government doing the same thing over and over and expecting the results to be different?

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What has been your biggest mistake and how did that mistake influence you? Leave me a comment!