Our mistakes do not define us

I may have talked about this before, and to be honest, I really can’t remember. Some of the early Friday emails got lost when we changed servers years ago… but even if I have, it is worth sharing again.

Years ago, when I was playing Little League Baseball, it was my final year and we were one of the top teams in the league. We were playing against one of the other top teams during the regular season. It was the last inning and we were up by one run. I was pitching.

They had a man on third base and there were two outs. Two of their best hitters were coming up. I called a timeout, asked the coach to come out to the mound, and he and the catcher joined me for a meeting of the minds.

I began lobbying, “Look, both of these guys coming up have hit me really hard tonight. The guy after them has struck out twice; he hasn’t even fouled the ball off. Let’s walk these two guys and then I’ll face the third guy. We’ll strike him out and we’ll go home.”

The catcher did not want to do it. He passionately did not want to do it. I had never intentionally walked a player in my entire life. But I continued to lobby with the coach, “Listen, he’s never even fouled it off tonight. Let’s not take a chance. Let’s put these guys on and I’ll strike that dude out.” Well, I persuaded the coach, even though the catcher still didn’t want to do it, and that’s the strategy we took.

I walked the next two guys intentionally and so it is bases loaded. As I have mentioned, we are up by one and there are two outs. The guy that I had said I wanted to face comes into the batter’s box.

My first two pitches are balls. That’s not the way it was supposed to go.

I am now faced with, if I wind up walking this guy, that walks in the tying run. For my next pitch, I have got to throw a strike. And so I throw a fastball right down the middle of the plate… and he cranks it over the right fielder’s head and they win the game.

We come walking off the field because it was over. It was a walk off double right there, and we had lost the game.

The fault was all mine. It was my idea. It was my lack of execution. Some players wanted to blame the right fielder but it wasn’t his fault at all. This guy hit an absolute rocket out there.

There are a lot of life lessons that can come out of this scenario but for today I am going to focus on just one.

We all make mistakes in life. And I have made plenty of them. But our mistakes do not define who we really are.

I am not saying we treat mistakes flippantly. We need to take ownership and responsibility for our mistakes and in cases where we have hurt someone, we need to go and apologize to that person. We certainly can learn from our mistakes but to dwell on it and allow it to weigh us down on an ongoing basis, well, that would be a… mistake.

We need to get ready for the next play and get ready for the next game. The most important play (or step) is the next one. How we see ourselves after a mistake can determine our next five minutes, our next day, or maybe even our next year or years. Mistakes are not the definition of who we are.