Quote:
Originally Posted by djchameleon
Yeah, I understand that in hindsight but young people usually don't realize that and that's why they shun advice majority of the time. They take the person's advice for granted. The person that actually went through those troubling times were allowed to experience it and go through that so why can't I? is the mentality.
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That wasn't my mentality when I was a teen. My mentality was, "that won't happen to me". Of course, it did, and it does.
The problem with the youngest of us is that we're generally the least experienced, so there isn't that rate of failure to ground our egos and tell us we're not infallible.
The positive thing about making mistakes is that it does exactly that... grounds our egos and proves to us that we're not infallible. But I think that it's not really an across-the-board thing.
It's not like we make a single mistake and say, "Oh sh*t, guess I'm not perfect. Gonna take all advice about everything from now on and never make a mistake again!"
We say, "Oh sh*t, f*cked up on that one specific thing, but all the rest of my decisions and perspectives are good to go. Just that one part of it wasn't"
Then we proceed to prove ourselves wrong again and again, because we're not looking at ourselves and our perspectives as inherently fallible and in need of guidance. We're only checking our egos on a case-by-case basis. The rest of the time, it's running its unstoppable show, making bad decisions left and right.
Eventually, we see a pattern, gain a little humility and realize that maybe we're not as perfect as we thought we were. Maybe we're even flawed on a basic level. At that point, when we're able to accept that, we're able to accept the help and advice of others, knowing that just because we think we know what's going on doesn't automatically make it so.
To me, that's just growing up.
And to be honest, I don't think it ever stops. At this very moment, my future self is shaking his head and saying, "if I only knew then what I know now".
It's just something we have to accept.
And I think once you do accept such a thing, it makes your life a lot easier, because there are plenty resources around us that can make sh*t a lot easier in the long run.
We will all still overcome plenty enough mistakes if we're worried about building character. We don't have to make every mistake in the book to do that.
In fact, I think that if we made every mistake in the book, by the end of our lives, we'd feel pretty sh*tty about our inability to get a damn clue.