Often, though, mistakes are easy to avoid just by being in the right mindset. On average, a human will commit 10 critical mistakes in their lifetime. You might be thinking at this moment, “Well, I can count about 20 of them and I'm only 16 years old!” Well, I'm talking about things that 50 years from now you will look back on and say, “I really messed up.”

Personally, I am someone who ends up committing a lot of mistakes, but the way I see it, mistakes are nothing but a life lesson in disguise and that gets me through a lot of rough days. You can either learn from them or let them burden you. It's your choice.

Nine out of every 10 businesses fail. Bill Gates is one of the creators of Microsoft and one of the richest people in the world but he had many businesses fail before. He was even a university dropout who only got his degree after becoming a billionaire. Ever heard of Traf-O-Data? Probably not; that's one of his first failures. No one becomes good at something without making mistakes. It's said that the master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried. Think of the sports you play. I bet you when you were first learning how to shoot you missed a high percentage of them. I bet when you first tried to write your name you made a mistake. As Bob Ross once said, “No mistakes, only happy little accidents.”

I believe we live in a society where we are too focused on people's mistakes rather than what they do well. We often would rather look at the bad than the good that someone did. I'm someone who has made a lot of mistakes throughout my life and I feel that people have often judged me on those rather than everything I have done right and everything I've done well. If you think about it, we are all humans and making mistakes is inevitable.

In school, you learn something, then do a test on it. In life you are given a test that you must learn from. My favourite quote is as follows: To make good decisions, you need experience. To gain experience, you need to make mistakes. Mistakes are the learning curve of life. Without them, life would be dull.