In the movie “When In Rome” the protagonist asked her father a question about whether he was sure that he was doing the right thing or regretting making a certain decision, I smiled when he answered:
“Honey, you cannot learn from my mistakes. You’re going to have to go out there and make your own. Now, you could get your heart broken or you could have the greatest love affair the world has ever known, but you’re not going to know unless you try.”
What a beautiful one!
I genuinely remember one time when a friend told me to not bother do something, that I said to myself okay then, I want my own mistake. and I meant by that having my version of what they consider a mistake, I wanted to have my experience.
I’ll explain..
Biochemistry tells us that different cells can respond differently to the same chemical signal. for example, imagine two muscle cells; one is skeletal, and the other is in the heart, both of them have acetylcholine receptors, both of them bind this neurotrasmitter to those receptors.
The result is: the skeletal cell will contract but the heart cell will do the opposite. they have the same receptors that bind to the same molecule, but you’ll notice completely different responses from each cell.
If a cell tried to mimic the other cell’s response, it would be wrong, and will automatically be programmed to die, because that’s not her job.
Same for us, we’re all humans (except if you were some kind of an alien reading this, then I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be a racist) we can go through the same situations, but we don’t respond the same way, and we don’t have to.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with learning from other’s mistakes, whether it was by reading books, watching interviews, seeing your friends and people you know fail… but not to the extent where you rely on their life lessons.
Because we’re different; everyone has different backgrounds, different circumstances, different beliefs, different lifestyles, different environments.. We’re living the same life but not all of us get the same tests. And even if we do, we won’t get the same results.
You gotta try to find out.
What could be meaningful, insightful and important to us, might be trivial to others and vise versa.
We can’t truly learn unless we owned our mistakes, because then it would be special and unique to us. We can ask tons of people and read millions of books, but we will authentically feel its value only when we do it ourselves.
So go out there, make mistakes, and learn from them. It’s your life, collect your own experiences and live each one of them.
