Anyone Who Has Never Made a Mistake Has Never Tried Anything New/The Beach of Life

Albert Einstein said that. He was a pretty smart guy right?

 I sometimes forget this, not that Einstein was a smart guy, but that if you have never made a mistake then you have never tried anything new. I tend to be a bit of a... I don't know what the word is for it. Not really a perfectionist, or maybe I am, but not in the traditional sense. I hold myself to a higher standard than I do other people. Something that is acceptable in other people may be completely unacceptable in myself. I expect myself to have life together and everything figured out. Guess what. I currently do NOT have my life together and everything figured out. I am so far from it at the moment, and it is driving me absolutely crazy!

I am not where I want to be in life, I mean really who wants to be 27, unemployed, and living with their mom? Okay, I suppose some people might like that, but I am not one of them! The problem is, I don't know 100% for sure WHAT I want to be doing in my life. I know that I want to be able to travel the world and help people. Sure there are some more nitty gritty details, but that is the basis of what I want to be doing. I don't want to be working for someone else the rest of my life, I want to be able to have my own business of some sort and set my own hours. I don't expect it to be all rainbows and sunshine, it will be hard work, I know that, but that is what I want.

Currently I feel like not only will I not ever have this, but that I am never going to even find a job. At all. It is getting a bit ridiculous. Sitting in church yesterday I started thinking about failures and making mistakes, and people like Thomas Edison who is quoted as saying, "“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” I decided I needed a little reminder of this. Below are some of my favorite quotes from Goodreads Failure Quotes.

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” 
― Winston S. Churchill

“You must make a decision that you are going to move on. It wont happen automatically. You will have to rise up and say, ‘I don’t care how hard this is, I don’t care how disappointed I am, I’m not going to let this get the best of me. I’m moving on with my life.” 
― Joel Osteen, Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential

“You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.” 
― Maya Angelou

“My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.” 
― Jack Kerouac

“Life is full of screwups. You're supposed to fail sometimes. It's a required part of the human existance.” 
― Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride

This made me think back to one of the days I was sitting on the beach in Hawaii. Two older ladies walked by me and we chatted for a minute. They made the comment that they were getting a bit tired and that they had walked until they were starting to feel tired, and then turned around to walk back. They laughed at themselves a bit saying that they had forgotten that they would have to walk back the same distance they had walked out. This made me think that sometimes on the beach of life we need to take a moment and look back at how far we have come instead of focusing on how far we have to go.

I know I oftentimes beat myself up because I am not where I want to be in life. There is so much that I need to accomplish in order to get myself where I want to/think I should be. Sometimes, I need to just stop and remind myself of what I have accomplished, and what I have overcome and dealt with in order to get there. So, stop and look back at how far you have come and take a break from worrying about how far you have to go.

How far have you come?