I was pondering on some things at the end of a long workday yesterday (as I am wont to do) and I saw some pictures of some Halloween themed gingerbread men.
It brought my mind back to a story my parents told me about when they were dating. Mom was a teenager when she was dating my father. She was experimenting with cooking (something she still does well into her sixties, I might add) and was making a gingerbread man for my father.
As she was taking it out of the pan, it broke.
Oh no. Disaster right? She’s trying to make something nice for her boyfriend and it broke.
Now my mother is totally a perfectionist. She doesn’t let that get in the way, though. Instead of trying to bake another, more perfect, gingerbread man, she iced the leg, and attached a note to it when she gave it to my father, saying that he broke his leg trying to jump out of the pan and run away.
That was an important lesson to me later on in life. Sure, sure, doing your best is important. But, an important part of being a person is to make good use of mistakes. I doubt I’d have ever heard of any gingerbread man my mother baked for my father as a teenager if it had turned out perfectly. It was the fact that she took a mistake and made it into an interesting story made it memorable fifty years later.
Do you have the creativity to turn a mistake into something awesome? If you do, what did you do?
Making lemonade is difficult for a perfectionist–like myself. I’m learning to self talk through the failures, disappointments and mishaps, assess the damage and move on. It’s not easy but totally necessary.