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Dead and Gone

 


In the words of the great 21st century poet and philosopher, T.I., “What matters more than the mistakes you made is what you are able to learn from them.”

We all make mistakes. We all fail. We all mess up. We all hurt people we care about. We all let others down. Mistakes are inevitable. Learning from them is not.

Some are too stubborn to change and thus continue to duplicate past mistakes, perpetuating those errors into the future. Others, buried by guilt or shame, hesitate to do anything it seems. Rather than learn from the past, they are paralyzed by it.

As T.I. further explains in the song, “Your pride is in the way.” Pride is what keeps you from benefiting from mistakes. By learning from past failures, you can improve and develop. By ignoring them, you are doomed to repeat them. Similarly, by being overcome by past mistakes, your growth is stunted as well. In either case, pride is in the way.

Humbly examine past mistakes. Feel their pain, learn from them, but then move on. Do not drag your past failures around with you along the path of life. Nor should you allow them to wait for you up ahead along the trail, dooming you to commit them again.

By learning from mistakes, you bury past failures and free yourself from them. And the New You will be better for it; for your Old You, as the poet says, “is dead and gone.”

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