Self-mastery Nº114
Clean your own mess before pointing theirs
All we have to do to create the future is to change the nature of our conversations, to go from blame to ownership, and from bargaining to commitment, and from problem solving to possibility.
— Peter Block
I sometimes think deeply about the things I’ve mismanaged or gotten wrong over the past few years. The stupid things I’ve said. The times I’ve overreached or overreacted. The short-sighted conclusions I’ve come to. And in certain moments, it feels like they seemed not just unforgivable but inevitable.
But if we sit and look back at how often everyone screws things up throughout their lives, suddenly, it’s a friendly reminder that we’re all just on our own little adventure. And sometimes, that journey involves sequences of oddly poor choices.
People (myself included) have a habit of blaming themselves a lot. Even if we innocently snip the thread or change our minds or break something, most of us tend to take it personally. But our achievements are never the most important event of our lives—it’s the screw-ups that are, in fact, the meat and main meal.
Myself over the past three years is a good example. 2020: I mostly wouldn’t recognise myself. I can see the good parts I finally managed to carry over; I’m still as determined and focused. But life comprised many blunders I never paid attention to back then. I was a terrible juggler who tried to add more objects to throw without coping with what I already had. Mistakes felt like unimportant anomalies. It’s not that I didn’t care, but I had so much going on that I managed everything poorly due to imperfect foresight.
In 2021 and early 2022 (apart from being a blur), I became too conscious of my screw-ups. I struggled to forgive myself for being human. Mistakes seemed irredeemable. And my mind fell into a frenzy of overthinking and irrationally pointing out issues in myself and everyone around me to make me feel like I wasn’t the only flawed one. It was like a mental prison. My thoughts had such an intense gravity to them. I lost my way from 2020 by caring too much about perfection.
But by 2023, so much had changed.
Being alive isn’t about ensuring that you never mess up or get everything right or make everything look and feel and sound perfect. The real challenge is giving your love freely despite not being perfect or making mistakes despite the chaos unravelling around you.
Part of being perfect can involve criticising others for what they lack. Whether the perfectionists are willing to admit that or not. Because to be perfect means you are free from mistakes, and a single mistake could cost you dearly. So, people put the blame on others. Self-serving bias is about why people blame others when they have no control but give themselves credit when good things happen. This trait tends to create perfectionists as other people ignore their own mess to divert attention elsewhere—keeping the shine in their lives.
Unless it’s your first day being human, chances are you’ve screwed up before. And as much as you might wish for it, nobody is going to want to clean up your mess. You could ignore it and do what people have always done—until another mess piles on top of the one you already have. But if you want to clean your mess, start by learning to cope with the mess first before healing: channel the pain into progress through better communication, not isolating or denying your mistakes, but learning how to be vulnerable enough to start from zero. Pointing out other people’s mistakes or vulnerabilities only lets the light in on the mess we have in our own homes.
One of the main reasons I had a lot of mess in my life was that I focused entirely on cure over prevention, and thus I had little grace for myself. Soon, we begin to heal, I’d tell myself. But it doesn’t matter how much we heal and move on if we don’t learn the lessons. Healing and prevention are proactive exercises, not reactive ones.
Real life is dominated by messing up your words and missing deadlines. At times, being late and poorly communicating things. But blaming ourselves for the fact is like blaming ourselves for reality itself. Life is a beautiful mess, and it’s time to love it for what it is.
We’ll never avoid making a mess or having something to clean up. It’s a wild and wonderful party. So, don’t worry so much about your stance or what other people might think about changing your mind. Don’t fixate on your own obedience and perfection and competitive supremacy. The messy but proactive ones are the ones making progress faster than the rest.
Life is not about rendering yourself shiny and triumphant or showing that you’re better than others. It’s about not missing the party and embracing the mess you may make from time to time.