Everyone does stupid things, and everyone has done things they regret. But reconciling with past mistakes allows you to learn from them, overcome them, and do better for yourself in the future.
There may be ongoing effects of these mistakes that you deal with every day. If you’re struggling to overcome them, you need to create a strategy. A good strategy will allow you to build a good life in spite of those mistakes.
Regret is a powerful force that holds you back and makes you feel unworthy of greatness. Be wary of inviting regret into your life and allowing it to take hold. By doing so, you allow entropy and inflation to rob you of the things you have achieved.
Welcome to the Saving Series – my thoughts on how reconciling with your past mistakes allows you to overcome the barriers preventing you from moving forward.
Making Mistakes
Making mistakes is a natural part of life. It’s a mandatory part of any learning process, and we need to continue learning in order to grow.
Of course, the impact of some mistakes is greater than others. Not every mistake is created equal. Bumping into someone because you weren’t paying attention is much less severe than physically attacking someone who bumped into you.
So what exactly is a mistake?
A mistake is an action that is considered wrong. Or an action you have taken that has led to undesirable outcomes in your life.
To imply that we will never make mistakes is to deny our humanity. As humans, we are prone to doing all sorts of things incorrectly. We will mistakes throughout our entire lives. It’s unreasonable to think otherwise.
The life that you lead will not be free from mistakes, and it will not go according to plan.
Mistakes will happen, and some of them can never be fixed. Therefore, we should live a life where we’re able to make mistakes without being wiped out.
Mistakes and Growing Up
As children, making mistakes forms a major part of our early development.
We’ll do something wrong, and then our parents, guardians, or teachers will say “no, you can’t do that”. Or “you did that the wrong way.”
We embed that knowledge into our future decision-making processes. This helps us avoid making the same mistakes in the future.
Ideally, the information we are taught is correct and can be relied upon in the future. But problems arise when that is not the case. Information we learn early on can create biases that lead to worse mistakes in the future.
An ideal education is one that creates a safe environment to make mistakes and learn from them without major negative stressors.
Learning doesn’t stop when we finish school either. Life is a lifelong learning process, and we should be striving to continue to learn and grow every day. This will mean making more mistakes as you progress.
If I am not making mistakes, I am not making progress. Mistakes are a powerful tool for growth if made in the right scenarios. As long as they aren’t too severe and you have time to correct them.
On Money Mistakes
It’s very easy to make financial mistakes nowadays. With easy access to credit cards, student loans, and buy-now-pay-later services, it’s easy to become overwhelmed with debt.
The mistake isn’t so much in using these services. If utilized wisely, they can be exceptional tools for increasing your leverage and building your wealth. But if used incorrectly, you quickly become on the wrong side of compound interest. At its extreme, this forces you into slavery to pay off your loans over a massive period of time.
Money mistakes have disastrous consequences if experienced later in life, as you are less likely to have an income to correct those mistakes. The sooner you make bad decisions with money, the sooner you can correct them and change course in the future.
However you learn about personal finance, it’s essential to take it seriously as early as possible.
If you don’t, you will make bad financial decisions, stunt your personal finance progress, and be trapped by wage slavery for much longer than you intend to.
My Mistake?
This blog was almost a mistake for me. I started this blog in 2020 during the height of the pandemic. Despite having it for over three years, I couldn’t bring myself to write on it.
It’s almost as though it wasn’t the right time for me to write.
As a result, the blog sat idle for several years. I only began adding content to it consistently in February 2024 after a 6 month career break.
In the end, I’d spent a few hundred dollars on web hosting and domain names. I always believed I would pick up writing again. So I kept my hosting active and continued to pay the domain fees.
Was it a mistake to commit to writing prematurely? Possibly. I think having the website ready for me to start was a big factor to kickstart my writing.
In any case, I don’t regret paying for the hosting given what it has become.
It’s Not Fair
Life isn’t fair.
This might be an unusual thing to mention in an article about reconciling with past mistakes. But I believe it plays a large role in how we approach making mistakes.
Luck plays a large factor in how people approach making mistakes. It affects the types of mistakes that people make, their severity, and the ability to learn from those mistakes.
A child stealing a chocolate bar may get chastised by a security guard or their parents. In another country, that same theft may be much more severe.
The environment in which you make certain mistakes may result in your experience being completely different to someone else’s.
Some environments punish mistakes less harshly than others. Consider yourself lucky if you are able to learn in one of these environments. Mistakes made in safe environments allow you to rise above them, and often leaves you better off for experiencing them.
How to Reconcile with Past Mistakes
Reconciling with past mistakes is essential if we are to keep moving forward. We continue to progress and grow as people when we attempt to correct the mistakes in our lives.
Some of those mistakes can’t be corrected. In those cases, we assess their impact and formulate a strategy for managing them going forward.
Understanding
If you made a mistake in your past, try to understand what happened and what went wrong. When thought about in this way, you’ll be able to come to terms with what happened in the past.
You may be feeling regret over what happened, and that’s OK. This process isn’t about brushing away your feelings; it’s the opposite.
It’s about acknowledging how you feel and understanding what is making you feel the way you feel.
Maybe you did something immoral or bad that doesn’t have a way to be corrected. Think about what led you to commit that act. Consider your decisions, influences, desires, and the information available to you. Use them to piece together why the mistake happened the way it did.
If you’re trying to correct a financial mistake, you need to understand exactly what the issue is. Perhaps you have a credit card debt that has ballooned out of control. Or you may have been the victim of a scam. Whatever it is, understand how you got into this situation.
Be kind to yourself, even if you know you did something wrong. You’ll need to be strong to overcome your mistakes, so there’s no point in beating yourself up over them.
Acceptance
Considering these mistakes are in the past, there is often very little we can do to correct them. All we can do is accept them for what they are.
The ancient Stoic philosophers had many methods of accepting past mistakes. The term amor fati – or “loving your fate” – refers to a practice that the Stoics used to settle their trauma. There were many challenges that the Stoics suffered through, from homelessness to execution. But they made it their mission to only suffer in body and not in mind.
Our perception of our mistakes doesn’t have to be negative. The Stoics often imagined themselves in disastrous scenarios outside of their control. Sometimes, these scenarios could arise from their past mistakes. In this sense, they would be powerless to stop these scenarios from happening.
Ultimately, the Stoics were interested in controlling what they could control and accepting what they couldn’t. Regret or remorse over past mistakes doesn’t resolve the challenges that arise from them. Our actions in the present moment do.
It doesn’t matter if those mistakes were within your control or not. At the end of the day, the mistake is in the past. The next step is simply to accept it and move on from it.
Assess Their Impact
Mistakes we’ve made in the past often have varying degrees of severity. Upsetting a friend in school has a smaller impact than doing some that gets you convicted of a crime. It’s important that you understand how impactful each given mistake is on your day-to-day life.
Some mistakes may simply be lessons learned that you know never to repeat. Others may burden you for the rest of your life. This step is about analysing your mistakes and determining how they impact your daily life.
It’s easy to assess the impact of financial mistakes; typically, the larger the dollar value, the bigger the impact.
There are some scenarios where this isn’t the case, where a small number may actually be hiding a big mistake. An example is a fee charged by a financial advisor based on a percentage of a portfolio. The value may be small on paper, but the impact on your investment returns will be massive. Not even their claims of higher than average returns will undo this. This type of fee structure often costs their victims clients hundreds of thousands of dollars in retirement.
Analyse your mistakes thoroughly to ensure you know exactly how much they will impact your life.
Create a Strategy to Deal with Them
Reconciling with past mistakes it also means creating action plans for those you are currently involved in. If consumer debt is stopping you from saving for your future, resolve your past mistakes before it becomes too late.
A good strategy is achievable and time-sensitive. It has a highly specific goal is mind, and you should know when you have achieved that goal. For instance, you may need to pay off a credit card debt. Knowing how much you plan to pay off each month can help you plan how to effectively use your money.
My Saving Series provides a framework for reducing your spending without reducing your suffering. If you haven’t read the full series yet, I encourage you to do so. I believe it’s a great place to start when approaching how to manage financial challenges.
Closing
Reconciling with past mistakes can be difficult, but it’s an essential part of our lives.
We will always do things incorrectly or badly, and it’s our duty to learn from those mistakes. Remember that in many cases, we are a lot luckier than we think.
We should consider ourselves lucky if we’re in an environment where we can bounce back from those mistakes. If we are, then we have a lot of agency to improve our circumstances.
Try to understand how you got to where you are and where you’re going. Understand how your mistakes have shaped you and how you plan to address them.
What do you need to do to resolve the negative impacts of those mistakes in your life?
If you can answer that question, then you are on your way to overcoming the mistakes of your past.
Thank you for reading.
This article is the final piece of my 13-part saving series. The savings series forms part of my personal philosophy – the principles by which I try to live my life. It’s taken me quite some time to collect these thoughts, but I believe I’m better off for it.
I’m on track to finish the whole philosophy by the end of the year. Once it’s complete, I plan to condense the information further to make it even more accessible.
I hope that you are as excited to read it as I am to write it.
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