I don’t believe in mistakes. We all make them, but every time we do, we learn something. Learning is growing, so mistakes are positive motivators in life. That is, if you look at them that way. It takes courage to admit to your own responsibility sometimes, but that’s the first step in mining the experience for the best. I’m reminded of Dan (our CEO)’s motto: Fail fast. Progress comes faster when you dive in. Children are masters at this. When I watch a child learning to walk, I have yet to see one simply stop crawling and go right into walking. There are falls, trips, bumps and scrapes – we could say that these are mistakes the children made in their journey toward discovering how gravity works with their bodies, but we don’t – we accept them all as parts of learning.

What a gift to give ourselves too. If we never gave ourselves permission to fail, sometimes to fail spectacularly, we’d still be crawling. It saddens me when I think of all the beautiful possibility that remains buried because of fear of mistakes. The bigger the goal, the more mistakes we’ll likely make. So what? There is such joy in being in a position that allows you to make some truly interesting mistakes. What if it doesn’t work? Ah, but what if does?