By Peter Torehall (TTT Subscriber Toshack).

 “The only way you can learn is from your mistakes. You can never learn from the things you did well. It’s impossible.”

Johan Cruyff , The Blizzard

When I was young in my first workplace, I gained some valuable insight into human psychology. I had made some bad decisions both at work and privately and was generally miserable. Then I learned to refer myself and my achievements (based on my bad decisions) by looking at my both hands. The one hand would represent me, the person, and the other hand would represent my achievements (good or bad). The mistake I made at the time was to think that the hands were always 100% connected or linked together, i.e. if I made a bad decision that would mean that I, the person, also was bad. Obviously that was not the case. I, the person, with my characteristics, soul, ethos and beliefs, was not changed by some single bad decision. Of course making a bad decision or two is not something to feel great about, but it helped me a lot to realise that I didn’t need to drag myself down, feeling bad about myself and my general life situation, because of one or two bad calls. I could instead start to look at the bad decisions as a way to help me improve myself, to gather experience that would later help me to steer clear of making the same mistakes again.

“We were the kings and queens of promises

We were the victims of ourselves”

From “Kings and Queens” by 30 Seconds to Mars

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