A philosophy of failure
Though I’ve been reading and writing about money for six years now, I still do stupid things sometimes. Most of these errors are un-interesting — it’s the compulsive spending that’s interesting, and I seem to have that under control — but sometimes it’s instructive to look at the mundane mistakes I make, like shopping while hungry.
Well, last week I made another relatively un-interesting mistake, but one that’s educational at the same time. Since it’s typical of the dumb things I do from time to time, I want to share it, and talk about why I’m not going to let it bother me.
The Importance of Routine
Because I know myself and my forgetful ways, I’ve tried to create routines around many basic financial chores. (Learning how to outsmart yourself is a great way to make behavioral change.) For instance, I’ve automated most of my bill payments so that I don’t have to worry about forgetting to send a check. Plus, I sit down for 30 to 60 minutes every weekend to work on my finances. Doing this prevents me from losing track of what I have and what I owe.
These routines help me, but they’re not perfect. Even with rituals in place, I sometimes make mistakes.
For instance, last weekend I did my month-end financial chores: I paid credit card balances in full, I prepped my bank deposits, and I wrote checks for upcoming expenses, including my rent. On Monday I mailed the bills and made a deposit. Done deal, right? Wrong.
On Thursday evening, somebody slipped a note under my apartment door. It was a notice that since my rent payment was late, I owed a $75 late fee. Say what? I knew I had written the check, but I verified everything in Quicken anyhow. Yep. Bill paid. Plus, I remembered taking the check downstairs with me when I went to pick up a package at the office. And the final proof that I’d paid? I couldn’t find the check anywhere. I must have made the payment.
But a quick check with the rental office revealed they’d never received the check. Where was it? Eventually I discovered it neatly tucked between two pages in my checkbook register. Alas, a typical J.D. mistake.
A Philosophy of Failure
A few years ago, I would have been angry at myself for making a mistake like this. Of course, a few years ago I wasn’t as financially secure as I am now. But more than that, I didn’t have the experience, the maturity, or the wisdom to cope with financial failures, even small ones. Now I can view things more objectively. I’ve developed a system for responding to small financial mistakes. Namely, I:
- Figure out what went wrong. When I make a mistake, I take time to analyze why it occurred. In the example that prompted this post, a simple act — tucking my check into the checkbook register — eventual cost me $75. I wasn’t mindful enough to remember the check when I spoke to the apartment manager; during the two minutes it took me to get to his office, I had forgotten about it. Lack of mindfulness is the source of many of my financial mistakes. Sad but true.
- Make a plan to prevent the mistake in the future. In this case, I know not to tuck the rent into the checkbook register next time. But more than that, I’ve resolved that every month I’ll just walk the check downstairs and put it in the rent slot as soon as I write it. Why wait? Procrastination is never productive.
- View each mistake as temporary and isolated. The worst thing I can do when I make a mistake — financial or otherwise — is to treat it as a part of larger problem. Maybe it is part of a larger problem, but in the moment, as I’m responding to the error, if I view it this way, I begin to think of myself as a failure, which only leads to further failures. So in this case, I’ve reminded myself that never before in my life have I been late with a rent or mortgage payment. This is is an isolated incident. And it’s temporary.
Another reason I don’t let small mistakes bother me is that I’ve come to recognize that all these tiny errors, while annoying, actually make me a better person. These little failures are the price I pay in order to find success. I mean, Get Rich Slowly would not exist if it weren’t for the hundreds of small financial mistakes I’ve made in the past.
And that’s the thing: A single small mistake is no big deal. It’s when these small mistakes compound or become habitual that you get into trouble. I used to be the sort of person who allowed mistakes to compound and to be come habitual. It was a disaster. But I’m not that guy anymore. Sure, I’m human. I do make mistakes, but I try to learn from them so that they aren’t repeated in the future.
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There are 81 comments to "A philosophy of failure".
Not sure if things are different in the US, but can’t you just have the rent automatically deducted from your bank account?
I agree. As a European, I constantly boggle how much checks seem to be an integral part of US livestyle. I haven’t written a check in 15 years.
The only checks I write are for:
– A small doctor’s office, where she doesn’t take credit cards
– When my students sell Girl Scout cookies or something (because they might lose the cash)
– Sending money to immigration for my husband’s various applications
I’ve had one box of checks for four years and we’re still nowhere near running out.
(I’m American.)
I still write checks for many bills that I have to mail in (especially the many medical bills I have) and prefer it. My landlord doesn’t take credit. I don’t write checks when I’m shopping outside the house and I love shopping online. I use my debit card primarily.
I also have my electricity and auto insurance automatically deducted out of my checking account too.
I don’t understand why people turn their noses up at those of us who still use checks for many transactions. Different strokes, right?
These are the same people who feel that e-readers have made books obsolete and that newspapers are just too, too old-fashioned. Feel free to ignore them.
What they fail to realize is that in a few years all of their precious technology will seem equally pathetic to a newer generation.
Wow, that seems a little harsh to me. I love automatic bill pay for most things, but still write checks to people like our nanny, contractors, etc. For the record, I also love physical books/newspapers/magazing, but when you’re going on a trip and have to pack light, nothing beats an eReader (I can easily read 6-7 big books on a week’s vacation)!
However, I think the real point is that J.D. and folks like him who have difficulty with remembering/executing recurring payments would really, HUGELY benefit from just setting up electronic payments one time, and knowing that everything will happen on time without any additional intervention needed.
It depends on the company. My property management company won’t accept any form of payment other than cheque (I’m in Canada) and won’t accept post-dated cheques either. It’s a huge hassle whenever I have to be out of town.
It depends on the bank. Some banks in the US offer that service, others don’t.
I’ve always rented from an individual landlord with just a few units in a small building (2-flat, 6-flat). Usually a retiree. They don’t take credit cards.
Who said anything about credit cards? We’re talking about having rent automatically debited from your checking account via automatic bank draft. No credit card involved.
I am so sick of the cheque for rent model. Can we please just charge that sucker? I am missing out on some awesome cash back rewards and it’s grinding my gears!
If you want the rewards, I’m sure your apartment manager could find a way to charge you 3% more to cover their transaction costs and give you back your 1% reward. Or you could just automatically move 1% of your rent payment over to a long-term savings account each month.
Took the words right out of my mouth 🙂 I think people tend to forget what merchants/companies have to pay when someone uses a credit card. That 3% commission would be $27 on $900 rent. Ultimately, it’s consumers/renters that pay that fee.
Yes, my last apartment charged $33 extra if I wanted to pay by credit card. Check or money order were the only other options.
Or how about cash? An apartment I used to live in didn’t accept cash which annoyed me because that was how I was keeping expenses under control, by paying cash!
Also, if you usually pay on time and then one time pay your rent late, I found that if you nicely plead your case with the super. or the apt. office, they usually let it slide without a late fee for that one time.
It has to be illegal to no accept cash. It says right on every bill, This note is legal tender for all debits public and private.
If you offer it and they refuse it, I’m not sure what would happen, you probably still owe but they would have a hard time wining in court late fees.
I would be interested to hear what would happen if someone refused cash and then sued you.
That’s a myth.
No business is obligated to accept cash. Businesses always have the right to decline cash. Think about the implications for counterfeiting if it were any other way.
Businesses are legally allowed to require payment in whatever form they want: Cash, debit, credit, gold coins, whatever. As a consumer, if you don’t like the terms, you simply don’t buy.
My landlord does not accept cash for safety reasons. Being slightly inconvenienced by writing a check is worth it if decreases the chance of the office staff being robbed.
My landlord accepts cash, but only in person. He has an office here onsite (my apartment building is above his restaurant so he is always here for one reason or another). I just have to let him know in advance so the we can meet. He gives me a receipt during the transaction.
ugh- when i lived with roommates, one would always give me the amount in cash because they had never ordered checks. our apartment was in an okay neighborhood, but the rental office wasn’t!!! i skittered around that neighborhood carrying pounds of cash to give to the landlord whose office i could never quite find (i would have just mailed a check, but said roommate was usually late with the rent too…). roommate also didn’t have a means of transportation, so whenever they were late, it was me that had to go trudging around in the hood with $800 cash in my jacket. uncool!!
much much prefer checks.
I agree, and it’s not just rent. I could be getting rewards points for mortgage, real estate taxes, condo maintenance, water, my chiropractor and all kinds of things if they’d let us use plastic!
But you are so right about that credit card assessment everyone’s charging – $15 to pay my auto insurance by credit card?
I don’t think so…..
My bank sends a check for my rent automatically, for no fee. The rent is never late. If my tiny credit union can do this, I’m sure others can.
One of my tenants does this, it’s great! It comes at the same time every month, and since it’s a bank check there are no worries about it bouncing.
It was nice that he let me know when he set it up, so that I wasn’t too surprised the first time I got a payment from a bank I don’t use (his name is not the most prominent thing on the check).
I do the same also with a credit union but the thing takes sometimes too long in the mail. Fortunately my landlords are cool and don’t mind waiting a couple of extra days every now and then– they know the thing ships out on schedule.
I did the same when I was renting. Both the credit union I have now and the big bank I used to have had online bill pay for no fee. I’d set it up for a year at a time to send the check on the 25th of the month which always leaves at least 3 business days to get there so I was never late and didn’t need to worry about paying it. After a year, when you renew the lease, setup another year of payments with the new price.
When one is older and these things happen, the first thought is “my mind is going”. It’s nice to know younger people sometimes forget things, too.
I hope you asked if you can get the $75 fee waived. Maybe you don’t have enough history for it, but places generally let things slide if you fix them right away (and have a good history).
I like to pre-pay several months worth of rent. This is a little bit of annoyance, I suppose, but interest rates aren’t high enough that I care. Especially if one has a short-term lease, it’s nice to pay it all up front. Anyway, you could pay three months worth at a time, and then you’d just have to remember to have a check sent on those specific days. That would cut down rent payments to four times a year.
Personally, that would make it so much worse for me!! I usually remember to pay rent, but (especially if the first is on a weekend) I forget that I have to mail my check. And I always need a few days buffer because of mailing it to my landlord. If it was every few months, I’d probably be so much more likely to forget! It wouldn’t be habitual. Maybe I should learn to embrace electronic reminders…
I should add that most of my leases tend to be shorter-term (6 months to a year), so it’s fairly easy just to pay it all.
Electronic reminders are how I helped remember to pay rent when I did do the monthly thing. Super useful! Google calendar has saved my butt. I don’t put everything on it, but I do put the most important reminders there.
I don’t know what your typical rent is, but to be able to pay off 6/month or a year lease in one fell swoop is pretty impressive – especially for those of us who scrape just to have a decent emergency fund. I would have to cough up $4770 to pay 6 months of rent or $9540 for a year.
The adverb you used, “just”, in the context of paying off a years worth of rent imply that its been a while (if ever) since you had to face making a difficult financial decision.
Not judging, just observing.
I save really well. I actually have a pretty small cashflow, and I found it much easier to manage my cashflow by eliminating small, regular expenses. I pull some money out of my lump sum savings account, pay the expense, and then concentrate on paying myself back rather than stressing about rent each month.
My last rent was $450 a month, so the 6 month lease was $2,700. This was a big enough dent in my lump sum savings to notice but not big enough to freak me out too much. Then, I just concentrated on paying back that much (or more) every month. Like I said, I’ve found that I’m really, really good at saving. But I’m not so good at not getting stressed about money and regular expenses. So I got “rid” of the big thing that was stressful (only stressed the one time I wrote the big check) and was able to concentrate on my strength.
I’ll grant that it’s not the best solution for the majority of people. But it is one way to do rent.
Great point, JD! Despite budgeting for the past 6 years, I recently made a mistake of my own:
I used to pay the majority of my bills manually. Well, awhile back one of my student loans informed me they were switching their payments to an automated debiting method.
Well…I forgot to note that properly, and being the creature of habit that I am, I still paid my monthly payment manually as I’ve always done and they ended up taking another payment from me when it was time for the automatic payment to come out.
It wasn’t the end of the world because we had the extra money in our budget, but it could have easily messed something up!
I’ve learned my lesson and now we just put all of the bills we can on auto-pay.
That happened to me when I switched over to automatic pay. “Luckily” they credited my account for two months, so I thought everything was great. Then I realized the dangers of skipping a month when I saw the next month how much of my payment when to interest. 🙁
I recently put several bills on autopay, but then I didn’t bother to balance my checkbook. When I sat down last week to pay rent, I balanced my checkbook and realized my account was overdrawn. I really need to keep the part of balancing my checkbook even with autopay. Luckily, the account wasn’t actually overdrawn until after the rent check, so I could quickly fix it without fees.
i have my bills set to autopay from my credit card, which i check weekly. this way all the bills are paid no matter what- no bouncing. the downside is all those charges that pop up on your statement! boo.
I recently got my first NSF fee in years and really beat myself up about it for a bit. Had I actually not had the money I don’t think it would have bothered me as much but a bunch of small silly mistakes and a bit of procrastination was what caused it. What’s worse is that my account was only short by a buck and change. The $40 NSF fee got me moving though and I fixed the little issues that I’d been putting off (the payment was from Paypal but I normally pay Paypal with my Mastercard. We had gotten new cards with new numbers though and the old ones no longer worked. I hadn’t updated the numbers yet and that was why I was using an old bank account for Paypal anyways).
as david bach says, USE AUTOMATIC BILL PAY SILLY!!! You should not spend one minute of your time writing checks for reoccurring expenses. I would never get my payments in on time if i had to send them every month. Your bank does this FOR FREE (well, the good ones). If I can’t pay by automatic debit I use bill pay for rent and charity contributions. Plus, it makes filing your taxes easy.
No mistake is truly a mistake if you learn from it.
The only ones to regret are the repeats.
You have the right attitude when it comes to failure. We all make mistakes but it’s how you handle them that makes the difference. If you don’t learn anything and continue making the same mistakes again and again you’ll never change. But if you learn from your mistakes and improve yourself then you’re one step closer to success.
I agree. I see them as tough life lessons, that I DON’T want to repeat.
I hate when I make a mistake with food, like leaving a gallon of milk on the counter all afternoon. On the one hand, it isn’t a significant loss of money; on the other, it is a dumb mistake, especially if I have to go back out to the store to replace the item.
Me too! Occasionally I’ve made enough meat or vegetables for a couple of feels and then forgotten to put them away. (Now I use an egg timer to remind me to put them away in 30 minutes when they’re cool enough for the fridge.)
My other pet peeve is recipes that don’t turn out right. I hate, hate, hate throwing out a batch of muffins or cookies because there’s either an error in the recipe or because I goof.
this!!! i was making a huge batch of cookies for my husbands office, and i bought all the ingredients ($$$$$) and got to work. i tried to just double the recipe instead of making it twice, big mistake!! i had to just throw out the entire mixture, it was a huge mess. nothing mixed correctly, and i just overmixed it so it was chewy and gross. ugh. i spent a pretty penny at the store buying a second round of eggs/butter/etc.
I have a habit of buying too much produce (on sale, of course) and then forgetting it’s all in the crisper. I end up saving and cooking some of it before it spoils, but some gets thrown away, and it’s just money down the drain.
I’m trying to get better about not being mad at myself for these little mistakes too. For me it’s a perfectionism thing. But I too have taken steps to try to minimize these mistakes, like setting up at least 5 electronic reminders to move my car on street sweeping days. Nothing more infuriating than seeing that bright rectangular ticket on your windshield!
Yes, these things happen. As we work towards financial independence, we are also emancipating ourselves from those feelings of anger and embarrassment when we make a mistake.
Having control over our money also means we are able to make little mistakes without treating it like the wheels are falling off.
We’re all human, and sometimes these things happen. Glad to hear you’re not beating yourself up over it.
Mistakes are NECESSARY for success. You learn more from trying and making mistakes than by months/years of research or sticking with your ingrained autopilot habits.
Interestingly, this approach is a great way to begin when starting a business–even though most people just go in whole hog with an idea without even testing or validating it. A better approach is NOT to start with an idea, but with a market. You then learn all you can about target customers in that market, uncover unmet needs or problems to solve, and put out an initial product or service to meet the needs of customers. Don’t spend a ton of time or money on this though. The whole point is to learn as much as fast and as cheaply as possible. That way, you can incrementally iterate toward success. If your original market or idea is a bust, no big deal; pivot, figure something else out, and keep iterating.
I don’t know about this. Yes, sometimes mistakes are isolated, but sometimes they are a part of a pattern, and it is helpful to identify that pattern if it indeed exists. And just because mistakes happen in a pattern or recur often it doesn’t mean we have to think we’re “failures”– that’s an accessory emotional response that has nothing to do with reality.
It’s good to look for underlying causes when mistakes repeat themselves. You attribute your error to a lack of mindfulness, but by seeing this as an isolated incident you keep from addressing the underlying problem, which can cause bigger problems than forgotten checks– car accidents from lack of mindfulness, for example.
And the funny thing is that mindfulness can be trained, just like everything else, just like you’d go to the gym and train your muscles. So this is a problem you can fix, and no, you won’t ever be a perfect being, but you could be more mindful anyway, and that would serve you well.
I think the problem here is that you’re tying self-esteem to performance. If your performance is good and error-free, then you feel “good” and worthy of love and existence. If your performance is bad, you feel “bad” and contemptible (“I’m a failure,” etc, and that can go all the way to “I should kill myself” with some people).
But that’s a problematic link because a) it keeps your self-esteem dependent on performance, and b) it keeps you from acknowledging serious mistakes or self-destructive patterns for fear they will affect your self esteem– so that’s a disconnect with reality to serve the ego.
That kind of reward/punishment system doesn’t need to happen though. You can be your own best friend and supporter no matter how bad you mess up, just like you’d do for a friend or family member. Of course we want to try our best, but self-esteem needn’t be dependent on performance.
You can be compassionate and forgiving when you blunder instead of giving yourself lashes. Do you beat up your friends or loved ones when they make a mistake? Do you kick your cat when he pukes a hairball on your favorite rug? Of course not. Then why should you do that to yourself? You shouldn’t of course, and that’s the point I’m trying to make.
If you separate performance from self-esteem you don’t have to look away from reality. That lets you address errors in a more effective way, and it gives you the freedom to have a healthy relationship with yourself regardless of circumstances.
I agree in theory, but since this is the only time this particular thing has ever happened, it sounds like it really is an isolated incident. And when something is an isolated incident, it’s also important to recognize that.
It may be, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make. This could be an isolated incident or it could be part of a larger pattern, but JD says he’ll treat it as an isolated one regardless. It’s right there in the quote above and in the article itself.
I’ll “zoom in” to highlight the crux of it:
That’s the thing–that’s a bad connection. A bad circuit causing sparks and overheating and gratuitous pain. It doesn’t need to be there.
Insightful comment, Nerdo. First, mindfulness is something that I have been consciously trying to train. That’s one reason I’ve de-cluttered my life, cutting back on my activities. It helps me be more present in the moment, to be mindful of what I’m doing and who I’m doing it with.
But more than that you’re right: In the past (and to some extent still today) I have tied performance to self-esteem. And it’s not just me. This is something that man perfectionists do. In fact, I was just talking this weekend with a woman who wants to learn to play the guitar. She’s smart, competent, and extremely motivated. But she’s been holding off on the whole guitar thing because she’s afraid to fail. She’s a perfectionist, and she knows that all the little failures while learning will gnaw at her self-esteem. The same is true with me and just about any failure, including when I forget to pay the rent. Because I expect so much of myself, I view these mistakes as character flaws. Part of what I’m trying to convey in this article is that I’m finally moving away from this line of thinking and into a more productive mindspace.
I’m working on it!
You might want to pick up a copy of Mindset by Carol Dweck. A negative pattern is just something to work on that can be fixed. It isn’t who you are. (I think tomorrow’s post on our blog is about engineering personalities…)
Good to hear, JD! And happy to help if I can. Nobody should go through this self-flagellation if they can avoid it.
I used to suffer from crippling depression because of this exactly, that’s why I’m familiar with how it works. Puberty disabused me of my grandiose childhood fantasies, so I was stuck in an auto-flogging subroutine ever since I was 13 (that’s right–13!). Adolescence was terrible, and a decade later I was very close to offing myself because of this (I’m not joking), and that lasted for several very bad years. How’s that for a toxic mind?
Anyway, I’m “cured” now, discharged from treatment, free to be as much of an ass as I need to be, haaaaa haaaaa haaaa. Oh, I laugh at it now, but back in the day it wasn’t pretty, all that stupid shame and the grandiose perfectionism. Of course therapy helped a ton, and books like “Bradshaw on the Family” (recommended by the shrink who cured me) were highly illuminating even if I didn’t apply those ideas 100%.
Getting out of that nasty trap has been a long road, but well worth traveling because being stuck in it was way harder than anything else. Wow, I feel light-headed when I realize the fate I escaped! And very grateful.
As for the mindfulness bit– Zen is purported to help cure that, but I’ve only dabbled, so I’m definitely still prone to breaking things these days. Shopping for new coffee cups soon! 😛
Thanks for the post. No one is perfect and we all make mistakes, but it’s important to learn from them.
I’m a renter after owning houses for more than 10 years so I’m not totally use to paying rent every month (my mortgage payment was automatically taken from my account). I was late once – with a late fee of $150! So I scheduled a ‘pay rent’ task in my calendar for the first of every month. I also mailed a check that never made it to the property management office. Fortunately, they were gracious not to charge me a fee and I have taken it directly to their office ever since. Like you, lessons learned.
Our checking account is at a major bank with online bill payment where the bank absorbs the cost of the postage for payments that can’t be sent electronically.
When I receive a bill I immediately schedule a payment. The payment can be scheduled for any future date.
This way I have control over how much I pay and when, but the act of bill payment is over and done on the day I get the bill.
I also record the payment info on the bill, scan it, and throw it away (yes, I have my data backed up). But that addresses a different issue (too much paper). I have a sub-directory for every year but I don’t get any fancier than that.
People make mistakes. Too bad it cost so much. $75 is a steep late payment fee.
We use Bank of America for banking and they will automatically mail checks for you every month. It’s an easy way to automate monthly bills with a set amount. We pay our HOA fees and daycare bills that way
I think the key here is that a mistake is easier to handle if your situation isn’t already dire. If you didn’t have the $75, or needed it for something else, I doubt you would have handled the mistake with such equanimity.
The right philosophy is vital when it comes to financial success.
Why don’t you just set up an automatic bill payment at your bank? That way you won’t have to think about it much and just have to make sure you have a certain amount in the checking account.
I’ve signed up for pay backup with all of my credit cards. They will automatically make a minimum payment to my credit card if I haven’t made a payment by the due date. If I’ve made a payment they won’t make one.
I only discovered this service about six monts ago when I inadvertently missed a payment and was disputing it with my credit card company. They don’t charge an extra fee either, which is awesome.
Thank you for this post. The very fact that you discussed a personal mistake in a public way shows us that you are human. You are willing to share this experience with us and it makes us feel a little better when we make an error.
Sometimes we are busy, or we have something going on at home that makes us think or act less thoughtfully.
My suggestion for anyone would be to take a few minutes following writing checks or using other bill paying strategies. This would be dedicated time to review what has and what has not been paid.
I pay evrything online, the guarantees delivery and I even get a confirmation number. I save the stamps and it is more efficient. Win/win!
My bank sends the cash for free to my landlord’s account at her bank. It takes a day or two and she has to confirm by email in order for it to be deposited. However, we pay the rent two weeks early because of how my spouse is paid (monthly on the 15th). Since we started that, we’ve never been late. Seeing a huge chunk of cash deposited from my spouse’s employer is my signal to go into my account and make the transfer.
I still use checks for charity/gifts and the rare purchase. A box of checks has lasted 2.5 years. I like the checks because I don’t always want to stop in at the bank for cash. Or an opportunity to give may arise suddenly and I’d like to give before I forget.
Couldn’t agree more with “Make a plan to prevent the mistake in the future.” Reflect on what went wrong and come up with an action plan so it doesn’t happen again. Change your behavior pattern.
Failure is philosophy….when you do it enough times you get self-knowledge and then you won’t repeat the same failure but you’ll find new ones….and then eventually you’ll find success. This is my wealth philosophy – you have to be prepared to make alot of mistakes and learn from them to get ahead.
you might want to check your state laws to see if it’s legal to charge a late fee for late rent, and if so, how much. some state laws permit only a reasonable late fee, and $75 may be unreasonable.
I can relate to this post because I’m also forgetful and tend to beat myself up over them. You’re right – we simply need to keep making adjustments and write the money off as tuition. And not confuse mistakes with identity.
I am who I am, and if I make 30 mistakes a year, that doesn’t make me a failure. In fact, if I only make 30 mistakes a year, I’m probably doing better than most. My identity should precede my actions and any results that may flow from those actions.
Thanks for the reminder! 🙂
Thanks for that third tip. I actually practice the first two tips with my parenting, especially when I review a particularly exhausting tantrum with a two-year-old 😉 I take a look at what went wrong–the triggers, the reactions, etc., and try to come up with a few solutions to prevent the mistake from happening again.
The third tip is good to keep in mind. Sometimes mistakes get so overwhelming that it’s easy to forget to take a step back and realize that these are common and are learning experiences, not the marks of incompetent people.
The tips are great rules to consider with money, family, and pretty much any time something goes wrong and I want to improve the situation.
I agree with the tremendous value of learning from failure.
I see the first step is to learn from our own failures/disappointments. But, the greater opportunity is to learn from other people’s failures–such as in blog posts.
I have to pay my student loan via check which can be mailed or cash in person. I often write checks, but it’s horrible when I find it on my desk the day before it’s due because I forgot to mail it. I started setting alerts on my phone to remind me to write the check and drop it off in the mailbox during lunch. I’ve been a lot better about it.
That being said, I agree with the value of failure. You were right in saying that learning how to outsmart yourself is a great way to make behavioral change. It worked for me!
Interesting comments.
Being in New Zealand where cheques are pretty much an antiquity (unless you are part of a community club), online banking is the way most people do their banking.
My bank lets me add in who ever I want to pay as a ‘payee’ and validates their bank a/c number. I can then set them up for bill payments (ie I control when they need to be paid, something like our irregular gas bottle payments) or as regular monthly payments such as mortgage payments etc.
It is so much easier than having to remember to pay someone. Also posting mail is on the out as it is getting more & more expensive to post a letter and less post boxes around to use (so finding one on the way to work etc is harder).
We have even set the kids up to get their pocket money regularly so we don’t forget. (We also never have cash as everything is paid via EFTPOS or credit card).
When I was flatting with friends while at Uni and working once finished, we had an account set up which we each put in the agreed amount to cover our rent, power & food. The rent & power automatically went out each week/month and we had an EFTPOS card for using for food. It worked great, no one forgot to pay their rent and the bills were paid on time.
I definately recommend using online banking to make your life easier if you haven’t used it before!
BTW I am a treasurer of a community club and constantly forget to send cheques off as it is manual. Not a good look to pay irregular bills late, but at least they don’t charge us for late payments.
Good luck JD – hopefully you find something that works for you!
shopping while hungry.->i used to be like this. When i started earning my own i used to buy things that are not important, i buy them because i want them not because i need them. Then came to realize that these are just material things which cant be brought when you’re already dead. There was even one time when the only money left was $50, i didn’t know what to do then, ran to my parents and asked for help. I’m no longer a kid i shouldn’t be begging when i am already earning. Time comes when i already knew on how to value money, it’s very easy to spend but hard to earn.
Very well said. Why should we be afraid of mistakes. This stems from our school days when we rebuked for doing mistakes. But as you rightly pointed out there are no mistakes only learning opportunities.
Did a post on similar topic Oops I did it!
I think you misnamed this post. It isn’t philosophy of failure. It’s a philosophy for success. Why? Because you evaluate your experiences, learn from the mistakes and chart a different path as a result. No failure at all.
I heard of a John Maxwell book called “Failing Forward”… the title captures the essence of what I am saying (I really should read that book some day).
I think you mislabeled this post. It should be “A Philosophy of Success”. Too many people fail to learn from their mistakes, whereas you describe a process of self-assessment and then a re-direction of your future path. Sounds like a recipe for success!
not many people write about their mistakes – especially the ones that happen frequently.
I make similar mistakes. it is not easy to stay on top of everything and make it all work out.
I like how you admit that you ‘remembered’ taking the check to the office only to find out you never did. That is not just a classic JD move that is a move that all of us make at one time or another. Thanks for keeping it real.
Could not agree more with this article. Also success and failure are in the eye of the beholder. Keeping a positive attitude and adjusting what you consider success can also help you in life. Anybody can be happy. There are millionaires in this world who are miserable and janitors that are happy.