- Not The Only One!
- Post # 52
- “Houston We Have A Problem!”
- Howdy!, and once again I say welcome to the slightly different. This post was originally named “Failure “, but lets be completely honest, and just say that isn’t very inspiring ☺️. Some of you may have been around for that Awe inspiring line,” Houston We Have A Problem “, as I was. I was ten years old at the time , when The Apollo 13 mission went airy. I’m not going to give you a complete history lesson here, but have hopes that it will inspire you to dig into a little bit of rich history as we were some what at the infancy of space exploration. This mission has inspired a great number of movies, books, including a brilliant piece of work that took place almost in our backyard in Hampton, Va. In conjunction with Langley Airforce base. Its been a few years now, but a great movie called ” Hidden Figures ” was done about some of the incredible work that took place to get a malfunctioning space craft and its crew safely returned to earth. So, lets just add this post to things that have been inspired by that mission. ☺️ I think most of us have some reference to the Apollo missions and man’s first landing and walking on the moon. The Apollo missions lead up to the more well-known shuttle missions, but the technology for the time was pretty remarkable and it gave our Nation a sense of pride before we all became so divided, and splintered. Ok, again, do a little investigation and not take my word for it. Jim Lovell was the commander of the almost ill-fated mission, and the one who originally made that Infamous statement. While the mission had a change in its priorities, becoming about to return the three man crew safely to earth, which was successfully done. If we gage it based on its original mission objectives, on that level it was a failure. When we fail, what do we do with that? There is always that old adage about when life gives you lemons, that you should make lemonade ☺️☺️. I often wonder what separates us into in to the two groups of people . Those who get stuck or give up when faced with adversity and or failure, and those who rise above the ashes of a charred dream. There is no doubt that the human spirit is resilient, and capable of overcoming great tragedies, such as the attacks on September the 11th, 2001. We all have things that we excel at , and other things, not so much! There are just a ton of cliches out there about failure and about how when you do fail, you have just eliminated one more possibility that gets you one more step closer to your goal or success. Some of them have been made by some terribly creative people, many of them have gone down in history as innovators, such as Ford or Edison, and perhaps I should not take it for granted that those names are hallmarks to you or carry weight. They have probably been replaced by Musk, Gates, and Zuckerberg, to name a few. I will try to spare you of to many of quotes and thought processes that have made them well known to say nothing about incredibly rich and famous. I don’t think that many of us relate to them and their level of success, and perhaps the question should become ,why not? , or how come ? We look at the end product and we admire and esteem them, but they are just ordinary people, like everyone else, but they somehow managed to catch lightning in a bottle and make it work for themselves and their investors and stockholders. We marvel at their success and often overlook or are unaware of how many failed projects took place before they hit pay dirt. So sometimes our greatest accomplishments are born or birth through some kind of unsuccessful attempt at a brilliant idea. Lets stop looking at the abstract, and look at how this sometimes plays out in everyday ordinary life. If ,I’ve said it once , I’ve said it a hundreds of times. We are all human and broken in some way and are prone to making mistakes and having failures present in our lives. I just spoke of two kinds of people and if you have been on the planet for any length of time you have encountered both, and if you are honest and open, you may be able to self identify your camp☺️☺️. We all make mistakes and its extremely rare that they are fatal and the end of the story. We should never let our mistakes define us . It’s like your occupation, it’s what you do, but hopefully that is not who you are, it’s what you do. I know sometimes for men, that can be difficult, but hopefully there is more to you than your choice of employment. So, it’s true of our faux pas as well, it’s what we did and not who we are, if you can’t distinguish between the two, then it’s the equivalent of throwing the baby out with the bath water, or in today’s culture, they cancel you. I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, so I compensate for that by seeking after knowledge, but hopefully not just for the sake of knowing more, but to gain wisdom and I believe that is a gift from God. That being said, I read a lot and challenge myself with different thoughts and viewpoints. Sometimes I grow and gain a new perspectives and at other times I may reject it as I don’t know how they drew that conclusion, or it doesn’t make sense on some primary basic level, or it could just be something out on the fringes. I’m not sure, but some of you may feel that way about this blog ☺️☺️. Ok, I recently was challenged by someone who I admire. His name is John Ortberg, he is an author, speaker, a broad thinker, and he has served as a pastor before as well, but mostly retired now and enjoying golf. So, I’m going to attempt to regurgitate a little of his thinking and it will probably come off like when you try to retell someone else’s comic material, but hopefully I will not loose you and at the same time not loose the meaning behind the regurgitation ☺️☺️. We all have a mindset, just as we all have a world view, as to how we perceive and interpret things, the prism with which we see and engage life. Theses mindsets determine our thought processes and how we conduct ourselves in the world in which we find ourselves. We are going to look at mindsets, and for our purposes here, there are basically two. We either have a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. John equates the fixed mindset with gifts and talents that we were born with, opposed to the growth mindset that actually encourages you to make mistakes in life because it helps you to grow, be it through painful experiences sometimes. The fixed mindset is not saying that you are fully developed with all of your talents at birth, but more so points to limits on growth, or a ceiling. A fixed mindset does not encourage you to make mistakes, because you view it as some sort of a failure , that you probably are not equipped to overcome, and you are concerned about looking bad, opposed to a growth mindset , that approaches mistakes and failures as an opportunity to learn and grow. The fixed mindset, when it encounters some sort of criticism becomes defensive, because it has already put forth its best effort opposed to the growth mindset that will use that criticism to become better, they will actually welcome it and see it as an opportunity to become better. The fixed mindset is always concerned about what others think of them and they are always performing for approval and acceptance. The growth mindset is more confident that they can overcome any mistakes that are made, because they engage and are constantly looking for new ways to achieve better outcomes, noticed that I didn’t say a good outcome, but better, believing that there is always room for improvement. When the fixed mindset sees others having successes in life, they become jealous, while the growth mindset is inspired by it and is more likely to celibate other’s sucesses. Take a moment and think about how this plays out in your day to day living. Think about how different all of your relationships would look, if you were free to make mistakes. The point is that we all do make mistakes every day, it’s not by some small chance if you will make a mistake, but when you make a mistake. I don’t want to breeze over the mindset thing because it effects us every day, in our thinking and how that works out in our actions and the choices that we make. If we can concede that we all make mistakes, and have failures on some level, let’s talk a little bit about self condemnation . I know for myself, when I make a boo boo, I can be so hard on myself. I can speak negatively to myself as in , you should have known better, what were you thinking?, you really drop the ball with that one. There could be many other ways that we can beat ourselves up , but what we must remember is that everyone has flops in their lives. We must remember that it is a chance for growth. Also to remember that a failure in life doesn’t define who you are. While we touch on self condemnation, let’s spread that out a little bit. There is something known as ” condemnation engineering “. This is when others will attempt to condemn you , to get you to do what they want you to do, or what they perceive should be the best course of action following one of your miscalculation. The irony here is that they probably can’t be as hard on you, as you are on yourself, if you are growth mindset person. If you consider yourself a Christ follower, then you should remember and take hold of the fact that God says there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ. If God is the higher authority and He doesn’t condemn us ,that means that we shouldn’t condemn ourselves or allow anyone else make us feel ashamed or that we are somehow less than, because we had a bad moment, a bad day, or even perhaps find ourselves in one of those seasons in life when everything doesn’t exactly smell like roses. ☺️☺️ I don’t wish to encourage you to make blunders, but more so encourage you to remember that it’s not the end of the world and it will blow over. Great thinkers, think about innovation and things that will change the world. Lesser thinkers , will consider ways for those applications to be implied in life and be made useful. The thinkers at the lower rungs of life talk about other people, so when they talk about you, and they will, usually behind your back. Remember that they will soon move on from you and be looking for the next juicy piece of gossip to spread around. Feel free to explore and learn.
- Till next time ✌️peace
- Sandy The Southerner
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