If You Make Dumb Mistakes, You Might Not Be Doomed

I used to find clips from Dave Ramsey’s show very comforting. Someone would call in with an insane amount of debt, maybe after making several poor decisions. And after questioning how they got into the situation, Dave Ramsey would always have a path forward – “rice and beans, beans and rice” – that made it look like you could climb out of almost any situation. For some reason, I was always terrified of making some kind of stupid decision and ending up penniless and alone. So to see people making clearly very dumb decisions and still being able to get out of it was reassuring.

Growing up, there was a lot of fear-based advice thrown around. “If you don’t focus on school, you’ll end up flipping burgers at McDonald’s.” “If you don’t save for the future, you’ll be sorry.” “Go to university and get a good job, or you’ll work in a dead end job for the rest of your life.” It made me feel like one tiny misstep would screw up my life forever. I was terrified to step out of line. (By the way, this was not primarily my parents – the school system and society and people around me all sent this message).

The overall message I got was, don’t make a dumb mistake.

I’m not here to tell you, go out and make a bunch of dumb mistakes. But I am trying to say, people recover from very dumb things. It’s not true that if you misstep, your life is over. I really needed this perspective to start making choices more freely. There’s not really a way to be sure you’ll never make a mistake in life, and more than that, you often learn from mistakes more than from always doing things “right.”

In the past few years, I’ve been spending time with people in the recovery community – people working the 12 Step program and all that. This is a quick way to meet people who have dug themselves onto a big hole in life. To just get back on their feet – not to middle class life but just to get functional – can involve facing jail, facing debt, facing ruined relationships, or other barriers like the inability to have a license or the lack of job experience and references. You don’t need me to tell you drugs and alcohol can derail a life. And you don’t need me to tell you many people don’t make it out. But yet – some people do.

I’m amazed how taking a complicated life situation, one step at a time, makes progress. The whole situation doesn’t have to be fixed at once – in fact, it can’t be. But you can take the next step and the next step and the next step.

It’s hard, slow work. It can be frustrating and feel like stasis. But looking back, there is progress.

Your life can change. It can look different. There is room to take risks and to make a choice to walk into the unknown.

And again, I’m not encouraging stupid decisions, or using drugs or anything. I’m just saying, if you mess up you can come back from more than you might expect. At least from more than your elementary teacher might have told you was possible.

After all, if you end up flipping burgers for a living you don’t have to stay there if you don’t want to! You might not be able to become Prime Minister, but you are probably able to do something different. Or maybe you discover you do want to flip burgers, you might want a different kind of life than the life you were told you were supposed to have.

Life was presented to me as a path where all my choices were front-loaded, and any mistakes made early were binding for the rest of my life. Yes, your mistakes will have consequences. But you can change your life too! You’re not totally helpless because of a choice you made at 13.

Maybe I’m preaching to myself here, and if so, let me know. Or maybe you can relate to this openness to making mistakes. Maybe you also need to make some decisions that could go either way, either to success or disaster. If this perspective is at all helpful to you, let me know!

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