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- Katie Montgomery MearsHost
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The past and our mistakes and foibles in it and our regrets, all of those things affect the current and the future.
In 1980, there was a dormitory for oil workers connected to a rig in the North Sea that overturned one night, and 123 men died as a result of that.
After this happened, a ton of engineering experts came in, and they had all kinds of theories about operational error and mechanical failures and what could have led to this, and every one of their explanations was complex and layered.
And it turns out that there was a much simpler answer, that a few weeks prior, a crack had been noticed in one of the support legs, and instead of reporting and repairing the crack, it was painted over and ignored.
And so whenever the storm that had the high winds that came on the night of tragedy happened, it pushed against that structure.
It caused the leg where there was a crack to snap, and the entire thing collapsed.
And I wonder how often we have mistakes in our lives that are seemingly simple, that are seemingly small, that lead to a wake of destruction.
And I wonder what we are inviting into our future when we ignore these seemingly simple and seemingly small mistakes, when we ignore our regrets, One of the most important things that we can do in our lives is to address our mistakes and make changes after we understand them.
Our ability to do this will affect our contentment, our careers, our capacity for withstanding hard things.
Look, our temptation is obviously to sweep a mistake under the rug, to pretend it didn't happen, to hope that nobody saw it, that we don't ever have to deal with it.
But what we need to do is to take that mistake, pull it out from under the rug, hold it up to the light and look at it from every facet.
And so we really understand what happened there and what we need to do differently.
As I'm saying this, I wonder how many of you are feeling kind of angst because you have some mistake you are thinking about or holding on to that you really don't want to hold up to the light.
No matter what an ex-spouse or a colleague or a child or someone else tells you, you are not your mistakes.
The past and our mistakes and foibles in it and our regrets, all of those things affect the current and the future.
In 1980, there was a dormitory for oil workers connected to a rig in the North Sea that overturned one night, and 123 men died as a result of that.
After this happened, a ton of engineering experts came in, and they had all kinds of theories about operational error and mechanical failures and what could have led to this, and every one of their explanations was complex and layered.
And it turns out that there was a much simpler answer, that a few weeks prior, a crack had been noticed in one of the support legs, and instead of reporting and repairing the crack, it was painted over and ignored.
And so whenever the storm that had the high winds that came on the night of tragedy happened, it pushed against that structure.
It caused the leg where there was a crack to snap, and the entire thing collapsed.
And I wonder how often we have mistakes in our lives that are seemingly simple, that are seemingly small, that lead to a wake of destruction.
And I wonder what we are inviting into our future when we ignore these seemingly simple and seemingly small mistakes, when we ignore our regrets, One of the most important things that we can do in our lives is to address our mistakes and make changes after we understand them.
Our ability to do this will affect our contentment, our careers, our capacity for withstanding hard things.
Look, our temptation is obviously to sweep a mistake under the rug, to pretend it didn't happen, to hope that nobody saw it, that we don't ever have to deal with it.
But what we need to do is to take that mistake, pull it out from under the rug, hold it up to the light and look at it from every facet.
And so we really understand what happened there and what we need to do differently.
As I'm saying this, I wonder how many of you are feeling kind of angst because you have some mistake you are thinking about or holding on to that you really don't want to hold up to the light.
No matter what an ex-spouse or a colleague or a child or someone else tells you, you are not your mistakes.
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