Learning seems so much more difficult these days. Oh, don't get me wrong, it's not that the opportunities don't present themselves. Rather, that the pressures to succeed don't encourage us to learn.

Think about it. Would I be exaggerating if I were to say that we seem to have taken the line "failure is not an option" right out of the movie Apollo 13 and adopted it as a professional mantra? Over recent years the phrase "Right First Time" has become almost as popular. And what have they done for us? Created success? Or, have they stopped us from doing anything that we think we cannot execute perfectly.

Trial and error is a time honoured way of learning. Yet nowadays there is little tolerance for mistakes. More often than not they are considered failures. And they "waste time". But imagine where we would be today if Thomas Edison had given up on the lightbulb after his first unsuccessful attempt.

Not all "mistakes" are bad. Sometimes they bring about even better results than those originally intended! Have you ever been taken to places you'd never even thought of, and allowed to achieve results you'd never dreamed of, as a result of your "failures". Or were these "learnings" perhaps?

Next time your struggle for perfection begins to paralyze you, consider Wayne Dyer's comment "You cannot fail, you can only produce results".

What's important is what we do with these results. Success most often comes from the learnings we derive from our errors.