I encounter a lot of business owners who lament the mistakes they’ve made and what these mistakes have cost them. I tend to take a different approach, and having made many mistakes over the years, that’s pretty handy.
The reality is that there really is no definitive guide when it comes to doing business. We simply have to make mistakes (and we all do), and these mistakes tend to cost us. From my experience the more they cost the bigger the lesson that we learn (if we are smart enough to learn it).
Over the years, I’ve certainly made bad decisions, many of which have cost me thousands of dollars (some tens of thousands). I used to beat myself up over these costly mistakes, but I got sick and tired of that. It served no purpose and my focus was on the loss, not on the lesson to be learned.
I needed to reframe a bad business decision and associated loss. For example if I lost $5,000 for some reason, I look at it as a $5,000 lesson and I’m pretty sure that the lesson I learned will save me a much larger amount sometime in the future. And that has proven true time and time again.
So whilst we want to avoid making costly mistakes, they really are incredible opportunities. But only if we are smart enough to learn the lesson and never forget it when we encounter a similar situation sometime in the future. I tell myself that a costly lesson is an asset and one that will bear fruit somewhere down the line.
This is a much more positive way of dealing with our mistakes and one that actually pays off. Rather than beating yourself up, take some peace of mind from the value of the lesson learned.