We All Make Mistakes
July 05, 2013My daughter and I took a trip together and I let her be our DJ and choose all of the music while we were in the car together. Well, almost all of the music. There are a few songs I had to ask to skip, I just couldn’t stand them!
Multiple times during the trip I heard her say “Music is my life” and knowing her since birth, I’d have to say that it’s a very important part of her life. (She just sang and played ukulele at a local pub where one of my friends regularly performs. He brought her up on stage as a “special guest performer.”)
She and some of her friends are talking about creating an indie band and they would then need a name. This article talks about some of the dumbest band names ever, and it’s pretty funny. In retrospect, I’m betting the members of Toad the Wet Sprocket, Hoobastank, and Panic! At The Disco all might reconsider the name of their band.
Sometimes, we make bad choices. With a band, once the name is on a CD (or however music is sold today), it’s pretty well locked in. There are many chances to re-name and undo that one potentially dumb mistake. But life is a bit different than naming a band in that we often get second chances to make up for our mistakes.
There’s one thing about mistakes that is universal. We all make them. The secret to recovering from them is acknowledging that you make them (being humble), not repeating the same ones over and over (learning) and taking something away from them so that you fine tune your decision making process continually.
As humans, we are always striving to make progress. Our cars get better gas mileage with each generation, our computers get smaller and faster, and our phones today have more computing power than the original mainframe computers of the past. Progress is something that is part of the human condition.
With technology, we have a starting point from which to work. With ourselves, we have no prior work to draw from. We have only the blank slate that is us at birth. It’s nice to try to learn from the mistakes of others, but usually we have to learn from our own mistakes. That’s part of the frustration and the fun of being human.
Some of the mistakes I’ve made in the past are things that I’ve learned from and won’t repeat again and I’m guessing that you have your own set. One of the bigger financial mistakes I’ve made was buying a new car, right off of the dealer’s lot. I got sucked in by the new car smell and the salesperson talking about how nice it feels to have your own car that no one else has ever driven, crashed or not taken care of (the scare tactic of “are you buying someone else’s problem if you buy a used car”).
It worked on me and I bought the new car and paid it off over the next 4 years, but halfway through the loan term, I realized I didn’t like the car all that much. It was an impulse decision based on emotion. My prior car needed a lot of work done on it (it totaled about $1,500) and I was sick of nagging little repairs. So, instead of paying $1,500 once, I paid $300/month for 4 years. I don’t even want to do that math!
What did I learn? Cars are expensive and those decisions are probably best made without emotions involved. Cars depreciate rapidly. If after 6 months, I wanted to get out of the new car (and I did….), it was almost financially impossible.
There is an enormous amount of depreciation early in a car’s life. The old joke is that the second you drive a car off the lot it loses half its value, and that may be an exaggeration but it’s only a slight one. Now I buy a 3-5 year old car in great shape and have an excellent mechanic check it out so that I’m not buying a lemon. From a bad experience, I’ve learned a lesson and have put in place a way to not repeat that mistake over and over.
All too often, I hear people say that they make bad decisions all the time and they beat themselves up for it. And, guess what? It becomes almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Bad decisions beget more bad decisions. It’s a repetitive loop and a lot of it is a mindset.
Here’s something you can do to give a fresh set of eyes (your own) to your thought process. Take a look at your past experiences and your past financial decisions and pay attention to the decisions that went poorly in the long run. What happened to make it a bad choice later? What do you know now that you didn’t know then? If you had to make that decision again today, what would you do differently? How has your decision making process evolved? If it hasn’t, you are likely to repeat those mistakes so it’s time to find a way to make better decisions.
You’ve grown in knowledge and your thought process today is very likely different than it was in the past. Give yourself some credit for that and with each important decision in the future, taking something from your prior mistakes can help you in the future. At least you didn’t name your band Kajagoogoo!