You might think that you have to do some
incredibly challenging things to make your life significantly better, but you
can make great strides just by greatly reducing the number of mistakes you
make.
A
successful life isn’t as much work as most of us believe!
You’ll make fewer mistakes if you can avoid
repeating the same ones over and over. Repeating your mistakes is like sailing
against a never-ending wind! It makes life tough.
Follow these tips to learn how to
avoid repeating your mistakes:
- Consider the impact your biggest mistakes have had
on your life. Think back. If you could just
change 2-3 choices you made, your life could have been much different. Even just one mistake can be
life-altering if it’s significant enough. A few of these mistakes
might include:
●
Marrying someone who wasn’t right
for you
●
Having another beer before hitting
the road
●
Texting while driving home one
night
●
Losing your temper and winding up
in jail or permanently destroying a relationship
●
Cheating on your spouse
●
Quitting a job before having
another one lined up
●
Choosing a college or major that
wasn’t beneficial
●
Quitting school
- Identify the mistakes you make repeatedly. It’s not just the big mistakes you might make once a decade that
matter. It’s also the repeated mistakes that you might not even realize.
Identify these mistakes. Here are a few examples:
●
Dating a type of man or woman that
is wrong for you
●
Overspending
●
Under saving
●
Being late to work
●
Eating too much
●
Being unreliable
●
Procrastinating
●
Assuming the worst
- Before making a decision, consider the long-term
implications. Many, if not most, poor decisions
are the result of only considering the short-term consequences.
●
Eating the yummy dessert, buying
the pair of expensive shoes you don’t really need, and avoiding stressful but
important activities are all examples of things that are enjoyable in the
short-term, but destructive in the long-term.
●
Consider how your decision will
impact you in a week, month, year, or longer before making up your mind.
- Allow your emotions to have their say, but then rely
on your intellect. Your emotions aren’t a good
tool for making a wise final decision. Your emotions are important, but
they lack wisdom and a long-term perspective.
●
Your emotions can, however, tell
you that an important decision has to be made. Make it intelligently.
- Evaluate each day. You make
mistakes each day. Identify them and eliminate them.
●
To accomplish this, sit down each
evening and list all the mistakes you made that day. Once you’ve done that, identify a more effective way to handle the
situation the next time it occurs.
- Consistently improve. To
become the most effective version of yourself, it’s not enough to just
eliminate your mistakes. Learn from each day and become a better version
of yourself.
●
If you can become a little wiser each day and use that wisdom, life
becomes an easy game to play.
●
So, avoid just addressing your
mistakes and address your mediocrity too. Address the things you do at a
satisfactory level but could do even better.
Reducing your mistakes can be the easiest way
to drastically enhance your life. Each time you repeat a mistake, it’s like
taking a step backwards.
The
efforts you make to improve your life are largely undone by the mistakes you
make. These repeated mistakes make life harder than it
has to be.
Examine your life, find the consistent
mistakes, and promise yourself you won’t do them again. That’s a great first
step toward taking control of your life!
