I will make mistakes, but I will always learn from them

Ryan YatesConsultant

Just a dude in his 30's doing things in Tech & trying to break the stigma's around talking about Mental Health
    reflection honesty mistakes learning growth   reflection honesty mistakes learning growth  Comments

Updated 12th July 2023 & again on 20th August 2023

Word of Warning - this post contains some not so nice language, but it’s use is for impact only!! Read on if you are happy to do so

As Linkin Park (One of my favourite bands of all time) started with in the lyrics to in In Between

Let me apologise to begin with Let me apologise for what I’m about to say But trying to regain your trust was harder than it seemed

I am a human being and part of this is that it is inevitable that I will make mistakes. Some may be as we class in computing terms, a fatal error, whilst the mass majority will be minor. Life to me would not be as much of an experience for learning or changing things, if I didn’t make mistakes & whilst it’s recommended to learn from others mistakes instead of your own, it doesn’t hit anywhere near as hard if you don’t make them yourself & in fact sometime it’s useful to make the same mistakes as others, even if to make you feel like you are not the only one to make that mistake. Though that said if you make them after someone else has, then they get to say told you so and vice versa.

The most common mistakes I make always include,

  • Spelling
  • not knowing quite the right way in which to ask for certain types of help, particularly to those that have offered.
    • When Technical related this is often due to me being both a hardcore researcher and somewhat stubborn in my learning method in that I tend to believe that if I don’t have the answer now, I will find if I give it enough time, mainly because I am really good at finding, and verifying the answers to the questions I ask what also I know that sometimes the answer will come to me randomly & usually when I am either getting food/drink or on a walk to the shop or when I can, when I am playing pool or snooker or sleeping. This is because the universe works in mysterious ways.
  • How I vent (Feel free to skip this one if you don’t like swear words)
    • but knowing my way of venting, especially as a Millennial Brit with a military family background, where swearing is actually common place & is actually a really fucking good as a way of relieving pent up stress, which is precisely why we do it. It’s also a part of our vocabulary, and not using it would be limiting us unnecessarily. That said, context is key, and why it was used in the first place.
      • If you are offended by the use of swear words, that’s definitely a you problem not a me problem, & whilst I am sorry (I do genuinely mean this too btw) that you may have taken offence when I do use them, I do try my utmost best to try and stay respectful to the fact that you and others dislike it by minimising my use of them around people as best as I can (except around those that I know are more accepting of their use whether that be casual or professional settings) whether that be in verbal or written form. However, in some cases that attempt to stop my self using them just flies out the window, whether mistakenly or actively on purpose. An Example of that can be found in this post.
        • Also, I quite frankly I’d recommend getting with the fact that we live in a world that’s literally burning down to ruins in front of our eyes in many aspects of life and many areas across the planet, I feel that we all should be worrying about way bigger & more important things than use of swear words or Boys that kiss Boys & Girls that kiss girls like treating People that use Drugs (PWUD) with more decency and respect than shunning them like second rate citizens and supporting Harm Reduction education as well as better support for employees who may use drugs to help manage their mental health, prescribed or otherwise! We should be putting more effort in areas of research including Cancer, Alzheimer’s/Dementia, fibromyalgia and supporting people properly when they are struggling with their Mental Health. So please have a long and hard think on whether the use of the word shit, or cunt, or shitcunt (as the Aussies like to use) really is doing any real harm in the grand scheme of things or whether or not it can be seen to be more acceptable now than what it has been in the past. I recently published a post on The Power of Swearing over on Mental Health Affects Someone Like Me, which will be part of a Series called The Power Of. But put simply it’s useful for emphasis and stress relief later..
  • How to properly ask whether my knowledge on a topic that I vaguely understand is correct or not. Though when I do ask people (& not just use Bing or chatGPT for my searching) I find that occasionally I’ll make the mistake of finding a slightly incorrect or lessor used words to in my ask.
  • Working across many things all at once, which is my brains need to keep busy, which is a big sign of ADHD, which currently is undiagnosed but all the signs are there & I plan to have a conversation with my doctor & get a referral for a further consultation, when I am more stable.
    • I can dream much bigger than just me.
      • Prime example of this is I have a project in mind that with a first round of investment of £2 million in funding & 2 years to build, I think that I could revolutionise the way that Snooker/Pool players could analyse if they are improving or not, by capturing a significant amount of data to be able to do so, which would use a significant amount of Microsoft Technology, including Hololens, Azure, Windows (client/server and potentially IoT/Azure Sphere) and of course PowerShell. I even have a potential sales model in mind, but as this is such a big project and frankly just a pipe dream with my current skill set, this is unfortunately unlikely to happen.
    • plan a number of really big things all at once, and whilst I tend to get chunks done at a time, I know that I have too many plates spinning and sometimes I have to put things on the back burner, till I can get back to it.
      • This is an area that my current L7 (equivalent to a Masters Degree) course on Project Management should help me greatly with.
      • However also having so much negative stresses on me right now (10x more than it should be) doesn’t help
    • having too many to work on whilst dealing with other real life issues that drag me down, like my physical and mental health.
    • I also spend less time with my doctors than I should, though perhaps more than someone in their early 30’s typically would, however this is less of a mistake and more of a there's more needy patients than I right now, and I should not take too much of my doctors time up unnecessarily when I may just being a bit of a Hypochondriac.

However there are also times where due to a mistake that I have made, can and does lead to a misunderstanding with others. This is unfortunate and I always try and correct that misunderstanding as soon as I can, especially if I realise about it soon enough.

I thought that I should write this as the lyrics to the song I Live, I Learn by Keeno (feat. Fæ Vie) really is me to a T.

I’ve made mistakes and I’m more than man enough to stand up, admit my mistake, explain why it happened, and do all I can to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

However, I will say this as a closer, what constitutes as a mistake to you, may not be what constitutes as a mistake to me, however but if you think I’ve made a mistake, particularly in publishing this or other articles, or you want to leave me some general feedback, you can do so via the comments section below or this form if you want to give it to me directly and not publicly, whether anonymously or not.

Also as an update since posting this, I feel that I made a mistake in not mentioning that the lyrics to The Reason by Hoobastank, fit so incredibly well for me, even if I would slightly change them, to better suit me as an individual and how they apply to me. I feel this was supposed to be heard as a love song to oneself, as opposed to how I initially heard it as one to another, though it could easily be to both. As do the lyrics to Mercy Me by Alkaline Trio do too (and more and more that I could and will add to this as time goes by) as do they lyrics to the lyrics to If I could turn back the hands of time by R-Kelly.