During a family dinner a dentist was lecturing his captive audience regarding the necessity of flossing. "Flossing sure is a pain in the rear," noted one family member.
"Then," said the dentist, "you're definitely not doing it right."Most of us make mistakes every day of our lives, often finding that we're "definitely not doing it right" when it comes to having our acts together.
Inasmuch as frequent blundering accompanies the human condition, and thus no one is exempt, we need to adopt a tempered view of the mistakes we - and others - make and, frankly, quit taking ourselves so seriously. In this regard, consider what sages over the years have said concerning human errors:
- When Thomas Edison was working on improving his first light bulb, the story goes, he handed a finished bulb to a young helper, who nervously carried it upstairs, step by step. At the last moment, the boy dropped it, requiring the whole team to work another 24 hours to make a second bulb.
Edison looked around, then handed it to the same boy. The gesture probably changed the boy's life. Edison knew that more than the bulb was at stake. - James D. Newton
- "We were deliberately designed to learn only by trial and error. We're brought up, unfor-tunately, to think that nobody should make mistakes. . . . But all my advances were made by mistakes. You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn't." - Buckminster Fuller
- "We spend a good part of our lives trying desperately to convince ourselves as well as anybody else that we know more than we really do. Once we accept and acknowledge our own ignorance, we can stand in a great library and look at all the tall shelves of great books reaching up the ceiling, and respect even more the collected wisdom of the ages.
"At the same time, we can understand that it is also the collected foolishness of the ages. Everybody makes mistakes. No shame in that. No individual man or woman is an expert in all things. And even in your own area of expertise, the longer you study and specialize, the more you know about less and less. Meanwhile, the less you know about more and more." - Charles Osgood
- "When a baseball player makes an error, it goes into the record and is published. How many of us could stand this sort of daily scrutiny? Or are willing to admit an error before we are called on it?
"Most of us are protective and defensive, from the chiefs of staff down to the janitor's assistant. Our aim is not to do right so much as not to be perceived as doing wrong.
"Yet all the decisive people in the world have made waves, and sometimes they have been swamped by them. But no waves, no progress; and the only way to avoid mistakes is to be totally passive, which is to say, dead. You won't get any blame that way - nor will you get anything else." - Sydney J. Harris
- "Virtually nothing comes out right the first time. Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. The only time you don't fail is the last time you try something, and it works. One fails forward toward success." - Charles F. Kettering
- "Notice the difference between what happens when a man says to himself, `I have failed three times,' and what happens when he says, `I am a failure.' " - S. I. Hayakawa
- Mohandas K. Gandhi often changed his mind publicly. An aide once asked him how he could so freely contradict this week what he had said just last week. Gandhi replied that it was because this week he knew better.
- "Tact is rubbing out another's mistake instead of rubbing it in." - "Farmer's Almanac"
- "To err is human; to admit it, superhuman." - Doug Larson
- "One good thing about repeating your mistakes is that you know when to cringe." - Doug Larson
- "To err is human - and to blame it on a computer is even more so." - Orbin's Current Comedy.
- "I make mistakes; I'll be the second to admit it." - Jean Kerr
- "Failure is an event, never a person." - William D. Brown
- "I'm loyal to a fault. I've got a great many faults and I'm loyal to every one of them." - Steve Allen.
- "Rare is the person who can weigh the faults of others without putting his thumb on the scales." - Bryon J. Langenfield
- "Experience is a wonderful thing; it enables you to recognize a mistake every time you repeat it." A.P.
- "It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded." - Ann Morrow Lingbergh
- "We're all proud of making little mistakes. It gives us the feeling we don't make any big ones." - Andrew A. Rooney
- Success covers a multitude of blunders." - Bernard Shaw
- "Success and failure. We think of them as opposites, but they're really not. They're companions - the hero and the sidekick." - Laurence Shames
- " `Well adjusted' means you can make the same mistakes over and over again and keep smiling." - George Bergman
- "An error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it." - O. A. Battista
- "Always acknowledge a fault frankly. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you opportunity to commit more." - Mark Twain