Mistakes: Missed stakes to success

BY SAMUEL EKEKERE

I grew up in a fairly hostile environment where mistake were hardly tolerated. My     father was a stern man who we took very seriously; he scarcely smiled with us his kids. We were only privileged to see him smile when he is amongst his friends and colleagues. He often expected that we developed the perfection of an adult which was hardly [possible. If we failed just a sum out of twenty, he would query why we had to fail that one. He expected one hundred percent from us and we were too little to understand that degree of perfection.

I’m grown up now and looking at those years, I’ve carried that mentality of striving for perfection transferred from my dad to me in everything I’ve had to do. I’ve observed through experience that a perfect state is not attainable. As much as we strive towards it, mistakes hang around.

If you play board sports or game, you will recall you have being in a situation when you played a game and observed it was actually the wrong game that should have given the other player undue advantage. However, you observed too that the opponent was blind to the game you had played and what seemed as a wrong move by you turned out to work for your advantage. 

It happens that on the route to success, we are bound to make mistakes. These mistakes are the errors or missed stakes that we hurt our perfectly conscious mind about because we did not get it right or seize the opportunity it should have provided. However the quality of success is not measure by the number of missed stakes or errors that we’ve come across on its path. It’s just a natural phenomenon that mistakes must exist.

I remember the words of an editor of a newsprint company to me years ago. He said, opportunities abound everywhere but your attitude will close your eyes to them. While he was right to a degree, I have observed that Opportunities to succeed abound every time and everywhere but not every opportunity is one’s opportunity to succeed. One may think this is my opportunity and he strives putting in all the energy he can garner but it all ends in a waste of energy and time.

I observed too that there are opportunities that we assume the right input has been made and certainly the omen looks clear and opportunities  is clear for all to see however it turns out that what you actually played was the wrong cards or input. It could be very hurting and discouraging.

Yet there are opportunities that will arrive that necessarily would not require you putting all the efforts as at other times. These ones often arrive after you have made all the mistakes and have made all the missed stakes and it bears marks of your success all around it. That’s when you hear phrases like, “I did not put in as much as I have being putting in previous work yet this turns out beyond my expectations.”

The challenge we face though is in actually knowing which opportunity is that rare opportunity of our success. Because opportunities abound every time and everywhere, it’s hardly possible to tell which one bears all the marks that we expect to see of our rare opportunity. The best advice then will be to keep trying each opportunity that arrives trusting God for direction, miss all the stakes that has to be missed and make all the mistakes that have to be made.

Success does not always arrive at the first opportunity that we get even though it could happen that way. It comes with all the difficult travails and errors with their corresponding pains. It is however certain that if we truly have to succeed, we will have to make as many mistakes as we can make and we would take decisions too that may not be correct just then even if we assumed we were on track.

It’s hard to think success and opportunities in life in this light however we must accept the fact of our existence in life as one with mistakes and missed stakes all around it for success is only built, one mistake and one missed stake at a time.