Be quick to correct your mistakes

January 31, 2013 | 3 comments

Anyone who has made a mistake
and doesn’t correct it,
is making another one.
~Unknown
When I was a young piano student, my teacher frequently admonished me to stop when I made a recurring mistake in my practice, go back and correct it, play it right five times, and then proceed. If I didn’t follow her rule, I’d make the mistake over and over again. The error became habit, and the routine was harder to break in the future.
I learned growing up as a youngster that the quicker I admitted an error to my parents, the faster it got left behind. If I tried to cover it up, the “discovery process,” often got drawn out, emotions heated, tension built, and life was miserable. No fun.
The old adage, honesty is the best policy, yields major dividends to those who practice it. People are often quick to forgive our mistakes if we readily admit them and work to amend. But try to cover it up, pretend like it didn’t happen, or play ignorant, and forgiveness is usually hard to find.


3 thoughts on “Be quick to correct your mistakes”

  1. So true, Evan, so true. It seems, humans can’t take corrective criticism. They always try to hide it. To my way of thinking, this attitude is destructive suicide. Corrective criticism enables a person to free themselves from making the same mistake, over and over again, never able to reach higher to improvement.
    It’s not shameful to make a mistake, as the old saying goes; “to err is human, to admit is divine.”

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