One of the most important things you can do is learning how to improve. How to be a beginner at something and get better; how to make mistakes and learn from them. It could be a language, an instrument, a skill - anything. As children, we are praised for learning something, even if we make a lot of mistakes while doing it. This kind of compassion stops for adults; and most importantly, we stop having this compassion for ourselves.
A lot of us are focused on results, not on the process itself. School and university put a lot of emphasis on how good you are at something within a certain timeframe - not how you get there. This causes us to think of ourselves as naturally good at some things, but not at others. The truth is that we all got there by practice, not by nature.
We are afraid of making mistakes - even though they are perfectly natural. We feel embarassed when we learn new information - and we feel a strange sense of pride when we know something that others don’t.
So here’s to trying and failing - and eventually: improving.
