Deep Thoughts: Why Waste Time Looking Good Rather Than Being Good

Is it just me or do people generally tend to make excuses and device cover-ups for mistakes in other to look good? Questions for the gods! I won’t even try to answer that as I can only speak for myself. Also, I can’t totally say that you will be able to relate to my experience but please do read on to the end, there is gold to mine in this write-up.

I was practising on how to write argumentative essays. An argument is presented to me and I am to challenge and analyse its validity based on logical fallacies I can point out in the argument. I am to work on as many arguments as I can and the only way to check improvement is to have someone review my essays and score me based on the clarity & concision, logical flow, style, etc. of my essay. Finding someone was not so hard hence I was good to go and finally wrote my first essay. Of course, I expected some grammatical and spelling errors, poor logic flow and the likes. It’s my first argument essay since like forever so it is bound to not be so great. But what I was not prepared for, was my misinterpretation of the argument presented thus writing the exact opposite of what I was asked to write. And this I discovered immediately after the thirty minutes time for writing was up.

I was beyond apoplectic, how could I sanely have presented an argument supporting A with pointers meant for supporting B. Shame on me and shame on me again for almost falling for the temptation of making changes to the essay after time was up before sending it to my chosen reviewer. My reasoning was that whoever reviews the essay would think of me as such a big fool and may belittle me thereafter. The question now is how would that help me? How would I improve my writing skills?

The truth is, I was not ready to accept my mistake at all. The mistake seemed to belittle me and I could not bear others discovering I was “human” enough to make such a mistake. So here goes little miss perfect making excuses and trying to cover up her huge blunder and rationalizing why covering up wasn’t so bad. But truly, is it bad if we cover up our mistakes to protect ourselves from the glaring judgemental daggers of the high and mighty hypocrites? Is there anything to gain by leaving my weaknesses out in the open?

Let me tell what I realised in answering those two questions. First; in lying or making excuses to cover up our mistakes, we become more hypocritical. Everyone else looks at us as perfect unaware of the layers and layers of coatings hiding our horrendous selves. Also, this might result in us thinking we are much better than others or even better than we truly are and as a result, there will be no plan for improvement or growth; just plain deterioration. So it all boils down to the fact that we are more hypocritical for every time we try to protect ourselves from hypocrites.

Secondly, there is strength in exposing one’s weaknesses. It results in true knowledge of oneself as one make several discoveries by viewing those weaknesses through the eyes of others and in various situations. This is the first step to improvement, recognising why one is weak and then taking steps to strengthen oneself. So in my case, sending the essay just the way I had written it would prevent me from hiding behind perfection and making sure not to ever make such a mistake again thereby improving myself even without the influence of the person who would dig deeper into my faux pas to reveal more of what I need to work on.

There are a few things that I have learned in this life which have resulted in my growth as a person and actually prevented me from correcting the essay.

1. Excuses are the tools of the incompetent
2. Never make the same mistake twice. Learn from every mistake

These statements have helped me times without number from falling into the pit of self-delusions and becoming the high and mighty miss perfect. In fact, I have learnt that sharing my blunders open my eyes to viewing them in better light and discovering better ways to avoiding them. And my friends laughing at me is enough of a motivation to never repeat the mistake again

On another note, I do believe, one should be prudent in choosing those to share their blunder with. For there are toxic people whose goal seemingly in life is to dominate by lowering others self-esteem. Such people would take your revelations and use them as weapons to pull you down and weaken your self-esteem. Beware!

Thus, when we make a mistake, bring it to the light, no covering up, not even a little, then learn from it. It’s not about always looking good in the presences of our peers, it’s more about growing to become better than we are. Hope we caught something from my slight analysis of mistake.

Jaa Mata!