Your Mistakes Matter More Than Your Wins

We are raised to worship success.

We share our wins openly and hide our failures in the shadows. We post our trophies, not our trials. From gold-starred school grades to job promotions to carefully curated Instagram feeds, the message is clear: winning is everything. And failure? It’s to be feared, erased, or quietly ignored.

• But what if that’s a lie? What if failure is not the enemy of growth, but its foundation? What if your mistakes—your stumbles and regrets—are not signs of weakness at all, but evidence that you are, in the most human and honest sense, becoming?

• This isn’t a motivational speech. It’s a philosophical reckoning. Throughout history, the thinkers who looked life in the eye at its rawest—from Socrates to Nietzsche, from Eastern sages to modern philosophers—didn’t just tolerate failure. They studied it. They honored it. Some even built entire life philosophies around it.

If you’ve ever wondered why your worst moments haunt you more than your best ones fulfill you, you’re not broken. In fact, you’re paying attention. Our minds naturally cling to pain to protect us and teach us. And understanding this might just be your turning point.

Why Failure Hurts More Than Success Heals

Let’s begin with the sting of failure. Think of a failed exam—you can probably still recall the dull ache in your stomach and the sterile smell of the classroom as you saw the grade. Or a rejection letter, the weight of those words “we regret to inform you.” Or a business that crashed, a relationship that fell apart. These moments carve deep into us. We remember the details with painful clarity: the way the room looked, the things we wish we had said. We replay these memories like tragic films in our minds, over and over, searching for what we should have done differently.

Now contrast that with your greatest win—your graduation day, your first big break, your proudest achievement. You felt euphoric in the moment, no doubt. But do you revisit that memory as often as you revisit your failures? Probably not. It’s not that failure is inherently more powerful than success; it’s that failure holds more data. There are more questions to ask about it, more lessons to dissect. Every mistake shouts, “Pay attention to this!” Success, on the other hand, whispers, “All is well,” and we often leave it at that.

Pain forces awareness. When something hurts, we zero in on it. Success can do the opposite—it can sedate our drive to improve. We relax, we celebrate, and we stop critically analyzing what we did. The ancient Stoics understood this well: they believed we grow not when life is easy, but when we face resistance. Just as muscles strengthen by lifting weight and bones toughen with impact, the mind and spirit gain resilience through adversity. The Roman philosopher Seneca put it plainly: “Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.” In other words, every challenge is like exercise for your character. Even Marcus Aurelius, a Stoic emperor, wrote that “the impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” The obstacle in your path isn’t just an obstacle—if you approach it right, it is the path.

So if a recent failure is stinging you, know that it’s leaving behind the roughness that growth will polish. We remember our failures vividly because they demand something from us. They change us. And that change—the discomfort, the analysis, the resilience that follows—is how failure heals us in ways success often can’t.

The Wisdom of Knowing You Don’t Know

Socrates, the father of Western philosophy, wasn’t revered for being right all the time. He was revered because he recognized when he was wrong—or simply didn’t know. He wandered the streets of Athens asking questions that made people uncomfortable, challenging everyone from pompous politicians to skilled craftsmen to examine their certainties. When others claimed to be wise, Socrates would poke holes in their logic, exposing how little they actually understood. Why did he do this? Because he genuinely believed in the power of not knowing.

According to an ancient story, the Oracle of Delphi once proclaimed Socrates the wisest man in Athens. Socrates was baffled by this. How could he be the wisest when he felt he knew so little? After much reflection, he concluded that perhaps it was exactly because he knew he knew nothing that he was wise. In his own words: “I know that I know nothing.” This wasn’t false modesty—it was a profound insight. Socrates understood that real wisdom begins the moment you admit your ignorance. The moment you say, “I might be wrong. I have more to learn,” is the moment your mind opens up.

For Socrates, mistakes and being wrong weren’t failures in the way we think of them today. They were the beginning of knowledge. Each error pointed out a blind spot, a chance to understand something better. His whole method of dialogue—the Socratic method—starts from a place of humble questioning. It treats every assumption as a potential mistake to be corrected on the way to truth.

In a world obsessed with looking smart and being right, Socratic humility is radical. It takes courage to say “I don’t know” or “I was wrong” when everyone else is busy posturing. But to live well, Socrates believed we must constantly examine ourselves and be willing to correct our errors. He famously said an unexamined life is not worth living, and part of that examination is recognizing our missteps.

So the next time you feel ashamed for getting something wrong, remember that by admitting your error and being curious about it, you’re already on the path of wisdom that Socrates walked. Feeling uncertainty or recognizing a mistake isn’t a sign of weakness—it’s the first step toward real understanding.

Fall, Then Rise Again

Friedrich Nietzsche had little patience for an easy, comfortable life. He was the kind of thinker who believed that true strength is forged in hardship. And he knew what he was talking about—his own life was riddled with difficulties, from chronic illness to personal isolation. Nietzsche looked at pain and struggle and saw not enemies to avoid, but necessary conditions for growth.

His most famous saying has become a cliché, but take a moment to consider it in earnest: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” We’ve heard it countless times, slapped on coffee mugs and motivation posters, but Nietzsche meant it as a deeply profound observation about life. He wasn’t suggesting that pain is fun or that suffering is somehow glamorous. Far from it—he knew suffering intimately and wrote about how agonizing it can be. What he was saying is that pain is necessary. Without challenges and trials that push us to our limits, we remain, in his view, complacent and weak. If life never tested you, would you ever truly know what you’re capable of? Probably not. Without hardship, we stay soft, shallow, and small.

Nietzsche introduced the idea of the “will to power,” an inner drive in all of us not just to survive but to overcome, to assert our existence in the world. Every fall, every heartbreak, every rejection, according to Nietzsche, is a test of that will. Life, in his eyes, isn’t picking on you or trying to knock you out of the game for cruelty’s sake; it’s presenting you with opportunities to flex your spiritual and mental muscles. He would argue that greatness cannot be microwaved or rushed—there’s no instant, painless path to it. Greatness is cooked slowly, over the fires of adversity.

Think of mistakes and failures as the gym of the soul. Just as you go to the gym and lift weights, straining your muscles so they’ll grow back stronger, life makes you lift its challenges. It’s hard, it might hurt, you might sweat and want to give up. But if you persevere, you come back mentally and emotionally stronger. Nietzsche, acting as a stern personal trainer for your spirit, would tell you to get back under the barbell of life every time you stumble. That failed project, that painful breakup, that lost job—pick them up, examine them, and see how carrying the weight of those experiences makes you tougher and wiser. Fall, then rise again, a little less fragile than before.

And there’s another concept Nietzsche loved: amor fati, the “love of one’s fate.” He encouraged us not just to accept what happens, but to love it as necessary for our journey. In practice, that means loving not only the wins but also the losses, because they shape you. It’s a high bar to clear—loving our fate, mistakes and all—but it’s a powerful way to live without fear of failure. If every setback is seen as fuel for becoming who you’re meant to be, then in a strange way, you can embrace your missteps with gratitude. Nietzsche would smile at that.

The Freedom of Letting Go

In stark contrast to the Western obsession with achievement, Buddhist philosophy invites us to let go of the very need to win. The Buddha taught that suffering (dukkha) arises largely from attachment—attachment to our desires, to success, to our identities, to the illusion of permanence. So naturally, when we fail at something, the reason it hurts so much isn’t just the loss itself. It’s because we were attached to something that the failure seems to snatch away.

Think about it: when you fail, you often grieve not just the event, but what you believe it says about you. A failed marriage isn’t just heartbreak; it might trigger the thought, “I am unlovable.” Losing a job isn’t just a financial worry; it can spiral into “I am worthless.” We cling tightly to ideas about ourselves—“I’m the successful one,” “I’m a good parent,” “I’m smart and capable.” When failure undercuts one of those ideas, it feels like an attack on our very self. That’s why it’s so painful.

Buddhism offers a gentle but profound solution: non-attachment. This doesn’t mean not caring or being indifferent. It means not gripping so tightly to a specific outcome or identity. You are not your wins; you are not your losses. In fact, from a Buddhist perspective, even the concept of a fixed “you” is questionable. You are the awareness behind these experiences—a flowing, changing being. When you practice seeing yourself as the observer of your life rather than the sum of your achievements, something liberating happens. Mistakes stop being threats to your identity or worth. They become simply experiences and information.

From this place of non-attachment, a failure doesn’t carry the same venom. It’s a moment in time, a set of conditions that came together and then passed. Yes, you might feel pain or disappointment, but you can also step back and say, “Okay, that happened. What can I learn from it?” It’s like holding a hot cup—if you grasp it too tightly, you get burned, but if you hold it lightly, you can feel the warmth without injury.

There’s an old Eastern parable about a farmer whose horse runs away. His neighbors say, “What bad luck!” The farmer simply replies, “Maybe.” The next day, the horse returns with a herd of wild horses. “What good luck!” the neighbors exclaim. The farmer says, “Maybe.” Later, the farmer’s son tries to ride one of the wild horses, is thrown off, and breaks his leg. “Terrible luck,” the neighbors mourn. The farmer, consistent, says, “Maybe.” Soon after, the army comes through the village conscripting young men for war, but they skip the farmer’s son because of his injury. “What wonderful luck!” the neighbors say. And again the farmer says, “Maybe.” The story illustrates a Buddhist-like principle: don’t cling to judging every event as purely good or bad. You never know what it really is until the story unfolds.

Your failures, seen through this lens, are not final verdicts on your life or character—they are simply events in the flow of your life. Give them space. Breathe through them. Let go of the story that “this ruins me” or “this defines me.” When you release that tight grip, you can find the lesson or even the opportunity hidden in the loss. The freedom of letting go is that mistakes no longer imprison you; instead, they might even enlighten you.

The Leap of Faith

Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, wrote a lot about what it means to live authentically. He observed that many people live in a state of quiet despair, not because something terrible happened to them, but because they never truly pursued what their soul desired. We often play it safe: we wear polite masks, make choices that others expect of us, and stick to the well-trodden path. Why? Because if you never take a risk, you minimize the chances of a spectacular failure (or so we think). We avoid risk to avoid regret, and in doing so we sometimes avoid living.

Kierkegaard believed that to become your true self, you sometimes have to do the daring thing—the thing that scares you, the thing with no guarantee of success. He famously called this taking a “leap of faith.” Now, in Kierkegaard’s context, this often meant a leap toward a life of meaning or religious faith, but we can apply it broadly to any bold decision where you cannot see the outcome. It’s the moment you risk everything comfortable for the chance at something great. And yes, that leap very often involves the real possibility of failure. In fact, if there’s no chance of failure, it’s not much of a leap.

To leap is to be vulnerable. Imagine literally jumping off a cliff hoping you can reach the other side—you might make it, or you might fall. Your stomach lurches, your heart pounds. That’s what it feels like to quit a stable job to pursue your passion, or to confess your true feelings to someone, or to start over in a new city. You could fall. Kierkegaard recognized that risk deeply. But he also issued a warning: not leaping—never daring—is its own kind of slow death. He wrote, “To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.” In other words, a person who never risks, never fails, and never stretches beyond the familiar might avoid some bruises to the ego, but they may also wake up one day feeling they don’t even know who they are, having never allowed themselves to truly be tested or seen.

In this light, your recent mistake takes on a new color, doesn’t it? Maybe you took a chance on something—a new career, a creative project, a relationship—and it crumbled. It hurts, yes. You lost your footing for a moment. But that stumble happened because you dared to walk somewhere new. That’s not a step backward; that’s living. Kierkegaard would likely nod and say that by trying and failing, you were more “awake” to life than those who never try at all. The misstep is momentary; the growth it sparks in you, if you allow it, can put you more solidly on the path to finding yourself.

So dare to take those leaps, even if you tremble. Each leap, even the ones that end in a fall, can teach you who you are and who you’re not. Each failure born of courage is a sign that you’re truly alive.

Mistakes as Identity Shifts

Let’s bring this concept home to you. When you fail at something important, it often feels like more than just a bad outcome—it can feel like an earthquake in your sense of self. You’re not just dealing with a result; you’re dealing with what that result means to you as a person. This is why failure can be so devastating: it doesn’t just knock down our plans, it threatens our identity.

Consider this: If you’ve always succeeded in school or career, you might think of yourself as “the smart one” or “the capable one.” Now imagine you get fired from a job or your new business flops. Suddenly, that identity is in question. “If I was so capable, how did this happen to me?” If you pride yourself on being a loving, responsible person and your relationship falls apart, you may start to wonder, “Am I actually hard to love? Did I fail as a partner?” The illusion of control and the story you told yourself about who you are get stripped away in a big failure. It’s like looking into a shattered mirror—disorienting and scary.

We fear this scenario so much because it feels like a kind of death—the death of the person we thought we were. But here’s the flip side: it’s also a rebirth. This is the transformative power hidden inside failure. Each mistake holds a door, and behind it is an opportunity to become someone new. Think of it as meeting an “upgraded” version of yourself—someone stronger, wiser, more compassionate, or perhaps more humble. But you only get to meet this version of you by walking through the pain and uncertainty that failure brings.

For ages, philosophers have reminded us that we’re not fixed in place. Heraclitus said no one steps in the same river twice, meaning you are always changing. Failure can even speed up that change by revealing the gap between who you are and who you thought you were.

So ask yourself: Will I let this failure define me as “the one who can’t do X,” or will I treat it as a challenge to redefine myself? Will I say, “I’m not cut out for this,” or will I say, “I’m not cut out for this yet, and I can grow into it”?

It’s normal to mourn the story you had about yourself—that story might have been comforting. But sometimes we have to let an old story burn down so we can write a new one. If a mistake has made you question who you are, take heart: that means you’re on the cusp of growth. The discomfort you feel is you shedding a skin that no longer fits. Walk through that door of uncertainty, and you’ll meet a self you didn’t know you could become—perhaps one more resilient, more empathetic, or simply more real.

Each time you walk through the fire of a mistake, you forge a new identity—one that’s a little closer to the truth of who you really are, beyond the ego and expectations.

The Myth of the Flawless Genius

Let’s debunk something once and for all: the idea that truly successful or brilliant people don’t make mistakes. It’s a myth, a fairytale we’ve been telling ourselves. We tend to romanticize success stories when we see them from the outside. We imagine our heroes—whether in art, science, business, or any field—just soaring from one success to another in a straight line. But dig a little deeper into anyone you admire, and you’ll find a graveyard of mistakes and failures that nobody glorifies.

Pick a famous name and you’ll usually find a litany of setbacks:

• Vincent van Gogh: In his lifetime, he sold only one painting. One. He died thinking he was a complete failure, having no idea that his work would later revolutionize art and sell for millions.

• Oprah Winfrey: She was fired from her first TV anchor job early in her career. Her boss told her she was “unfit for television.” It’s almost laughable now, considering she became one of the most influential TV personalities in history.

• Albert Einstein: He didn’t speak fluently until around age four, and people worried he might have a learning disability. Later, as a young scientist, he had many of his papers and proposals rejected. (So if you’ve ever been called a late bloomer or had a project turned down, you’re in good company.)

• Simone de Beauvoir: Before she became a renowned philosopher and feminist icon, she actually failed the final exam in philosophy on her first try. She passed the next year and went on to reshape philosophical thought and social theory.

  
  

And those are just a few examples. Steve Jobs was kicked out of the company he founded and felt like a public failure for years—until he used what he learned to come back and revolutionize the tech world. J.K. Rowling was rejected by a dozen publishers and was nearly penniless before one took a chance on Harry Potter. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school varsity basketball team and later said, “I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career... And that is why I succeed.” The list could fill a book.

The point is, genius is not about avoiding mistakes. It’s about using them. Every failure in these stories was not a full stop; it was a comma, a pause in the journey where the person regrouped and figured out a new direction. We don’t often hear about these failures because society loves a tidy success narrative. But behind every trophy, there’s usually a shelf of crumpled drafts, rejection letters, bankruptcies, broken relationships, and sleepless nights filled with doubt.

The myth of the flawless genius suggests that if you were truly talented or destined for greatness, you’d get it right the first time, clean and pretty. That is a lie. Real greatness is messy. It’s trial and error. It’s falling on your face, wiping the blood off, and trying again. It’s being bloody, bruised, and rebuilt — again and again. So the next time you mess up and think, “People who succeed wouldn’t fail like this,” remember Van Gogh’s single sold painting, Oprah’s firing, Einstein’s early struggles, de Beauvoir’s exam hiccup, and countless others.

Success stories aren’t linear. They’re collage portraits made up of many attempts, many errors, and a handful of breakthroughs. If you’ve got a few spectacular failures under your belt, congratulations—you’re in the same boat as the legends. Keep rowing.

Philosophize Your Failure

All this philosophy is enlightening, but you might be wondering: what do I do the next time I fail miserably at something? How do you actually philosophize a failure when you’re in the thick of it? Here are some practical steps—drawn from the wisdom above—to help turn your next mistake into momentum:

1. Name It Clearly. Don’t sugarcoat what happened with excuses or pretty language. Call the mistake what it is. Say you blew the presentation, or you hurt someone’s feelings, or you missed a deadline. By naming it plainly, you strip it of some of its dark power. It becomes a specific event (something you did) rather than a sweeping judgment on you as a person (something you are). When you name your failure, you take the first step in owning it — and anything you own, you can change.

   
   

2. Separate Identity from Outcome. Remind yourself that you are not your failed exam, failed business, or failed marriage. Those are things that happened or choices you made; they are not a definition of your worth. If a friend told you “I failed at X, so I’m a failure,” you would insist one moment doesn’t define them — give yourself that same grace. You are the process, not the single event. You’re the person who is trying, learning, and growing through each outcome, good or bad.

   
   

3. Reflect with Honesty and Compassion. Now that you’ve named the failure and reminded yourself it doesn’t define you, take a good hard look at it. This is the Socratic step: ask yourself tough questions. Why did this happen? What might you have done differently? What can you learn here? Be brutally honest — this is where the rich lessons are. But equally important, be compassionate with yourself. Don’t turn reflection into self-flagellation. Think of yourself as a caring detective examining the case of what went wrong. Maybe you lacked information, maybe you were overconfident, maybe it was just bad timing. Acknowledge the mistakes, but also acknowledge the courage it took to make the attempt at all. Honesty gives you insight; compassion gives you the resilience to use it.

   
   

4. Share Your Failure. This step is scary but empowering. Talk about what happened with someone you trust, or with a supportive group, or even just in a journal or blog. When you share your failure, you remove the sting of secrecy and shame. You’ll likely discover that others respond not with scorn, but with empathy — often with “I’ve been there” or “I appreciate you saying this.” It also makes you accountable to learn and move forward. In fact, some communities even celebrate failure: entrepreneurs hold “fail fairs” to swap stories of mistakes, and engineers write post-mortems on project disasters so everyone can learn. By owning your story — warts and all — you free yourself from its weight and give others permission to be honest about their own struggles.

   
   

5. Keep Moving. Don’t let failure be the period at the end of your story. Think of it as a comma — pause, breathe, learn, and then keep going. Ask yourself: what’s the next small step you can take? It could be trying again with a new strategy, pivoting to something different, or simply getting out of bed the next day and refusing to hide. Progress is progress, no matter how small. By moving forward, you show yourself that failure is not the end of the road — just a rough patch along the way. That mistake can become the beginning of the next version of you, armed with a little more knowledge and a lot more grit.

   
   

The Gift of Embarrassment

Let’s talk about one of the most uncomfortable aspects of making mistakes: embarrassment. It’s that hot, sinking feeling when you realize everyone saw you mess up. Maybe you gave a speech and stuttered through it, or you pitched an idea that fell completely flat, or you made a goofy mistake in public and felt the eyes of a crowd on you. We avoid embarrassment like poison. We rehearse, we double-check, we stay quiet, all in the hope that we won’t ever have to feel that flush in our cheeks and that desire to disappear.

But here’s the thing: embarrassment is often the most direct path to growth. It’s a flashing arrow pointing to where your comfort zone ends. It shows you where your ego is fragile. Maybe you’ve built an identity around being competent or liked, and then boom — you do something that makes you look silly or clueless. It hurts, no doubt. But if you can endure that moment, if you can sit with the discomfort without bolting or throwing up a wall of excuses, you’ll find that it passes.

Picture this: you say something dumb in a meeting. The room goes quiet, and you feel your face burning. In your mind, you’re certain you’ll never live it down. But maybe you take a breath and even manage a self-deprecating chuckle: “Well, that didn’t come out the way I intended.” The meeting moves on. An hour later, everyone is wrapped up in their own tasks and concerns, and that little gaffe is all but forgotten. You, however, walk out of that room knowing something important: you survived. The embarrassment came, washed over you, and then receded.

Each time you survive an embarrassing moment, it loosens the grip that fear has on you. You realize that embarrassment won’t kill you — it’s just a feeling. Yes, it’s uncomfortable, but it’s also temporary. And once it’s gone, you’re still standing. That realization is powerful. It frees you to take more chances, to be a bit more authentic, because you know you can handle it if things go wrong.

Some thinkers, especially in Stoic philosophy, suggest that a lot of our suffering comes from trying to protect our ego and reputation. Embarrassment is basically your ego yelling, “Help! I look bad!” But when you let yourself feel it and see that you come out okay on the other side, your ego’s voice gets a little quieter next time. You gain a kind of quiet confidence. It’s not the brittle confidence of never having failed or looked foolish; it’s the sturdy confidence of knowing you can handle it when you do.

To be embarrassed and still show up again the next day — that’s a subtle kind of bravery. It’s philosophy in action. It’s you living out the idea that your value isn’t determined by one moment or other people’s fleeting judgments. So the next time you find yourself wanting to crawl into a hole from embarrassment, remember: it’s just a feeling, and it will pass. And when it does, you’ll still be here, a little tougher and a lot more free.

Rewriting the Story

Mistakes will always sting. There’s no philosophy that will make messing up feel wonderful. But while you can’t control the fact that failure hurts, you can control the story you tell yourself about it. And that can change everything.

Philosophy, at its best, invites us to rewrite the narrative of our lives in a deeper, wiser way. Instead of seeing your life as a straight line where a mistake is a detour or a dead end, try seeing it as a winding journey where every twist has its purpose. What if your worst moment was actually the doorway to your best self? Think of the hero’s journey in myths and movies: the hero always faces a dark night of the soul—a crushing defeat or a great loss—right before they undergo a transformation and find their true strength. That lowest point doesn’t prevent the hero’s triumph; it enables it. Your life is your story, and a terrible setback can be the plot twist that leads to character development, new insight, and eventually, a better chapter.

Ask yourself: What if the thing you regret most taught you something you couldn’t have learned any other way? Maybe that betrayal showed you the importance of trust and boundaries, and that business failure forced you to develop skills and resilience you never would have gained otherwise. Maybe the setback even jolted you off a wrong path and set you searching in a better direction.

There’s a beautiful concept in Japanese art called kintsugi. In kintsugi, a broken ceramic bowl is repaired with gold lacquer, and the cracks are highlighted instead of hidden. The bowl becomes more interesting and beautiful because of its imperfections. What if you looked at your own broken pieces that way? Each mistake, each scar, becomes a line of gold in your story — not something to hide, but something that adds to your uniqueness and strength.

Many philosophical and spiritual traditions echo this idea. Nietzsche’s amor fati urges us to love our fate — every part of it, even the failures, as necessary steps on our path. The poet Rumi wrote, “The wound is the place where the light enters you.” The wisdom across cultures seems to agree: our cracks and wounds are often the very places where the light of wisdom enters.

You are not defined by a single moment, no matter how disastrous it felt. You are not “behind” in life (there’s no real race to be behind in). You are not broken forever. You are learning. With every mistake, you’re adding depth to your experience. With every failure, you’re refining your approach. There is no faster path to wisdom than to confront your own errors and grow from them.

So, start rewriting the story you tell about your failure. Change “I messed up, it’s over” to “I messed up, and this is where I begin again smarter.” Reframe “I’m a failure” into “I’m human, and I’m growing from this.” When you do that, you reclaim power over your narrative. You stop being the victim of your story and become the hero of it — the hero who gets knocked down but learns and adapts and carries on.

In Sum

You have a choice in how you relate to your mistakes. You can keep hiding them, polishing your image and pretending you’ve got a perfect record. You can live in fear of the truth coming out, carrying the weight of those secrets. Or you can own them. You can wear your imperfections openly, as part of who you are.

Remember this: you are a flawed, evolving, unfinished masterpiece. In fact, that’s exactly what you’re meant to be. Every masterpiece has underpaintings and erased strokes beneath the final image; every great novel has drafts and edits. Why should your life be any different? You’re still in progress.

Your mistakes are not your shame; they are your map. Each one has shown you where the rocks in the road are, where the wrong turns can happen, and where to tread more carefully. Each one has also shown you unexpected paths and new directions. If you follow that map—learning from each error, adjusting your course, and continuing onward—you’ll find it often leads to discoveries that success alone could never have shown you.

So don’t run from your mistakes. Follow them. Trace the lines of those experiences and see where they point you. Hold your head high on this winding road, knowing that every stumble has value. Trust that even if the path is not linear, it is yours. It’s taking you through the terrain you need to travel to become the person you’re meant to become.

And the next time you trip, don’t see it as proof you’re off track. Pause, look around, and pick up the nugget of wisdom at your feet. Then keep going. Your journey isn’t over — in fact, with each mistake, it’s just beginning.