Failing Forward

The first time I was able to take a Spanish class in my school was when I was in seventh grade. I was so excited to learn a new language. It was really cool, but in order to become truly fluent, it took a long time and a lot of hard work and dedication. In addition to my Spanish classes, I used to watch TV in Spanish, listen to the radio in Spanish, and go to church in Spanish. I even minored in Spanish in college, but by the end of my junior year, I still wasn’t completely fluent. I could speak it fairly well, but I wasn’t totally comfortable. I thought it would be helpful to completely immerse myself in the language and decided to study abroad for a semester in Spain. It was an amazing experience, but the hard part was that I had to be ok with making mistakes, because I definitely made a lot of them. I said a lot of wrong things and felt embarrassed for a few minutes, but if I had let that stop me, I never would have gotten any better.
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You can learn a lot more from your mistakes than from your successes. The important thing is to take those lessons and apply them as you move forward in life. For example, I reviewed a lot of title during my time as a title reviewer. I don’t remember the details of all of the abstracts that I reviewed, but to this day, I 100% remember any mistakes I made. The important thing for me was that if I missed something, that I learned from that mistake, adjusted my process so as to not repeat it, and continually improved. What have you learned from your mistakes? Whatever they are, make sure to always “fail forward”.