Positive Thinking Practice: Nobody's Perfect!

By Norman Vincent Peale

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Sometimes our problems—financial and otherwise—stem from our own bad judgment. A young man came to me quite dejected and depressed. He kept asking himself: "Why did I do it?" What’s wrong with me? I had the opportunity of a lifetime and I blew it!"

This 29-year-old man had been fired from a good position with a prestigious firm because, he said, he had made a serious mistake. Although it seems strange that a company would discharge someone for one blunder, I remembered the words of a prominent businesswoman, who had said to me: "He who stumbles twice on the same stone deserves to break his own neck." In other words, in her opinion, a person should be allowed one mistake, but not two.

Aren’t we blessed that God allows us so many more slip-ups! In that spirit, here are three suggestions to help you deal with the times you slip up.

1. Learn from Your Mistakes
Every mistake has a positive side and so we can see errors in judgment and mistakes as developmental experiences, something that can help us grow. In fact, it’s partly through trial and error that we develop judgment and mature.

A mistake is not something to be ashamed of. It’s a great teacher. A West Coast minister, a friend of mine, told me about a 19-year-old boy who came to see him. The boy sat with his head in his hands. He then blurted out: "For God's sake, pastor, help me. I smoked pot for months, and now I'm on crack. I'm all messed up inside. I know I've made a terrible mistake. But if I can only get myself straightened out, I'll never go back to doing drugs again." The pastor, being a wise man, showed the boy love, respect and esteem. He also referred the boy to doctors who could help him overcome his chemical dependency. "And," he told this boy, “through faith in God, you can create a chemistry within you that will give you a 'high' unlike any drug known to man. Then you will truly 'come alive'."

2. Replace Error with Truth
There’s always the temptation to repeat mistakes because so often they stem from an inner tendency of ours. This is an issue we must all understand and address. If our mental or spiritual condition is not right, we can become error prone. The correction for this is, of course, truth.

Have you developed the ability to distinguish between what is error and what is truth? We may try to make error into truth by rationalization, but that’s not possible. The issue is whether you are willing to ask yourself honestly: What will dominate me, truth or error?

3. Eliminate the Cause
We, in greater or lesser degrees, destroy ourselves to the extent that error dominates us. Here’s an exercise that can help us face up to where we are error-prone in our lives.

Take a sheet of paper and write down the really serious mistakes that you've made in your lifetime. Now ask yourself: How can you eliminate weaknesses?

A man once told me, "I've had a wonderful spiritual experience that I'd like to tell you about." I initially thought that the man was going to tell me that he was a converted drunk or thief, or that he'd been running around with someone else's wife and had stopped. But this man's difficulty was different.

"I was what you'd call a good man," he said. "I didn't lie; I didn't get drunk; I didn't do immoral things. But, I was just plain dumb. I did the wrong thing so many times, that I felt hopeless and depressed.” The man then said that he had read in my books that anybody can change just about anything in his life, if he'll turn his life over to God.