Quote of the Week...from Albert Einstein

A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.               ---Albert Einstein

Yes, it's okay to make mistakes, and learning from them is indispensable to becoming better at what you're trying to accomplish...no disagreement from me with the distinguished, groundbreaking physicist.  Of course, it's better to learn from others' mistakes, especially the kind where the consequences can be serious...even fatal, like crossing over the median into an oncoming vehicle's path from inattentiveness or getting hooked on a drug, for example.  And then there is the tendency for some, when caught having deliberately committed a crime or a serious ethical lapse, to refer to their misdeeds simply as "mistakes"...no, dude, you knew that what you were doing was wrong and did it anyway.  But that's about how the word "mistake" is used (or misused) and what Einstein was trying to stress is that folks shouldn't avoid trying out new things for fear of looking foolish when they almost inevitably flop at the start.  I'm thinking of getting more involved in chess, but I can confidently state that there's no way I'll ever improve my currently atrocious game without first having to go through several humbling experiences.  But to improve means I also need to develop a knack for discerning my mistakes and incorporating their lessons into how I play the next game, and this in itself may be the trickiest part of it all, requiring a fair amount of insight and wisdom...