Today's Quote: Neil Gaiman

Text:
Make new mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before.
~ Neil Gaiman

"Primordial Chaos, No. 10, Group I" (1906-1907) by Hilma af Klint.

Elizabeth Steinglass

Mistakes can be life lessons, like learning where not to take a nap, and learning about giving new things a chance, as you can see in the two poems IMPERFECT poet Elizabeth Steinglass shares today. The second one is a mashup of William Carlos Williams' This Is Just to Say and Dr. Seuss' Green Eggs and Ham. Fun!

napping by a tree
with a stack of unsold hats
those rotten monkeys

Give me back my hats!

*******

This is just to say

I would not eat
the eggs and ham
you offered
so many ways

and which
you had probably
cooked
for me

Forgive me
they were delicious
though green
and cold

ELIZABETH STEINGLASS lives in Washington, DC with two of her children (a third has flown the nest), her husband, and her sleepy cat, Scout. Her book Soccer Nonsense is forthcoming from Boyds Mills Press. You can also read her poetry in magazines and anthologies, including Pet Crazy: A Poetry Friday Power Book and The Poetry Friday Anthology for Celebrations, both edited by Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong. For more information, visit www.ElizabethSteinglass.com

Today's Quote: David Whyte

Text: All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die.
~ David Whyte

"Three Friends" by William H. Johnson courtesy Smithsonian Institution.

Losing as a Tool

Bobby Bones has a new book called Fail Until You Don't. He says:

“I wrote this book to be the opposite of Instagram. On Instagram, you look and see all the beautiful things people are doing all of the time. I wrote this book to show the opposite: most of life is not about all the wins, actually most of life is the rough spots and failures that get us to the wins.”

1-10-100 Rule

The 1-10-100 Rule is something that companies think about, so it might not seem like it would have much to do with our daily lives, but...

The 1-10-100 Rule says that the cost of a mistake goes up the farther that it goes. If a company is making a car seat, for instance, and they catch a mistake in the design, they might lose some money (whatever it takes to redo the work). That is "1" in the Rule. But if they didn't catch the mistake there and they started making the car seats and THEN they realized the problem, they would lose ten times as much money as if they caught it earlier (that's the "10"). If the mistake hadn't been discovered at the manufacturing stage and they actually sold the car seats and later realized the problem, recalling the car seats would cost much, much more (that's the "100" in the Rule). So being careful and taking your time can save a lot of problems down the road. This is true for many situations.

It's not only money at stake

Let's say you're writing a paper and you pick a topic that doesn't match what the teacher has asked for. You don't realize your mistake, but if you figured it out before you started writing, it would be a "1" in terms of "cost" (inconveniencing you). It would only inconvenience you a little. If you figured it out while you were planning your paper and taking notes, it would be a "10" -- some inconvenience. If you didn't figure it out until you wrote the whole paper, that would be a "100." Checking things early on, and then double-checking, can save you a lot of inconvenience. Can you think of anything else where, the earlier you figure out the mistake, the less of a problem it is?

Diane Kendig

Louisa Lane Drew as Mrs. Malaprop

IMPERFECT poet Diane Kendig wrote a clerihew for the blog about a character whose name became synonymous with a certain type of mistake.

Richard Sheridan
created this harridan
in Rivals, his play
where she mis-speaks all day.

A bit of info:
The word "malapropism"...comes from a character named "Mrs. Malaprop" in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's 1775 play The Rivals. Mrs. Malaprop frequently misspeaks (to comic effect) by using words which don't have the meaning that she intends but which sound similar to words that do.

Sheridan presumably chose her name in humorous reference to the word malapropos, an adjective or adverb meaning "inappropriate" or "inappropriately", derived from the French phrase mal à propos (literally "poorly placed"). [Wikipedia]

DIANE KENDIG'S five poetry chapbooks include the most recent Prison Terms, and she has also co-edited the anthology In the Company of Russell Atkins. A recipient of Ohio Arts Council Fellowships in Poetry and other awards, she has published poetry and prose in journals such as J Journal, Under the Sun, and Ekphrasis. She blogs at “Home Again” (http://dianekendig.blogspot.com/), and her website is dianekendig.com

Today's Quote: Mary Lee Hahn

Text:
I was thankful for a new day and the chance to fail better than I did the day before.
~ Mary Lee Hahn

Liz Garton Scanlon

IMPERFECT poet Liz Garton Scanlon shares a haiku here about a charming mistake maker.

Oh, no -- dropped a thread
and my sorry web now reads
OME PIG. Poor Wilbur!

LIZ GARTON SCANLON is the author of numerous beloved books for young people, including the highly-acclaimed, Caldecott-honored picture book All the World, illustrated by Marla Frazee, and her debut novel for middle grade readers, The Great Good Summer, as well Another Way to Climb a Tree, In the Canyon, Bob, Not Bob (co-authored with Audrey Vernick), and several others. Ms. Scanlon serves on the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and is a frequent and popular presenter at schools, libraries and conferences. She lives with her family in Austin, Texas.

Logic Mistakes

Sometimes the kinds of mistakes we make have to do with our thinking going awry. For instance, there's the "sunk cost fallacy." That's when we've put effort and time into something so we feel like we have to keep going with it, even though it's not in our best interest to do so. Like let's say we wait for a long time at a restaurant... we can tell that the restaurant is having a horrible night and they've run out of the food we wanted to eat, but we stay there instead of going somewhere else because we've waited this long already.

Buffy Silverman

thin ice
photo by mfortini

IMPERFECT poet Buffy Silverman writes about backpacks and origami in the anthology; here she talks about a potentially dangerous mistake:

frozen pond speaks with
warning cracks and groaning creaks...
skating on thin ice

it's less of a risk for these folks
photo by Yutaka Seki

BUFFY SILVERMAN is the author of 90 nonfiction books for children, featuring topics from Angel Sharks to Alligators, and Mars to Monster Trucks. Look for her nature-inspired poetry in anthologies and children's magazines, and visit her at www.buffysilverman.com.

Today's Quote: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Text:
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Linda Mitchell

IMPERFECT poet Linda Mitchell shares an inspiring diamante in the anthology, and here she shares a mini poem about an invention that could have been dangerous for its inventor. Chemistry can involve a lot of surprises and volatile mistakes!

Earliest known written formula for gunpowder,
from the Wujing Zongyao of 1044 AD.

Mixed a little...
boom!
with a long wooden spoon --
charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter
in a bamboo tube --
boom!
sparkles in the sky...
boom!
don't know why...
a mistake?
or a really lucky guy!

The inventor in Linda's poem was lucky,
but we don't know what happened to this bird:
An expendable bird carrying
an incendiary receptacle round its neck.
From the Wujing Zongyao.

LINDA MITCHELL is a family girl and middle school librarian which makes her increasingly curious, geeky and creative on a daily basis. She writes in the edges of her life. You can catch her weekly Poetry Friday posts at A Word Edgewise https://awordedgewiselindamitchell.blogspot.com/.

Make Failure Your Fuel

Abby Wambach at USWNT Training

Sharing something that U.S. Olympic soccer player Abby Wambach said at Barnard College's Commencement Address:

Rule No. 1: Make failure your fuel.

Here’s something the best athletes understand, but seems like a harder concept for non-athletes to grasp. Non-athletes don’t know what to do with the gift of failure. So they hide it, pretend it never happened, reject it outright, and they end up wasting it.

Listen: Failure is not something to be ashamed of, it’s something to be powered by. Failure is the highest octane fuel your life can run on. You gotta learn to make failure your fuel.

When I was on the youth national team, only dreaming of playing alongside Mia Hamm – Y’all know her? Good. I had the opportunity to visit the national team’s locker room. The thing that struck me most wasn’t my heroes’ grass stained cleats, or their names and numbers hanging above their lockers. It was a picture. It was a picture that someone had taped next to the door, so that it would be the last thing every player saw before she headed out to the training pitch. You might guess it was a picture of their last big win, or of them standing on a podium accepting gold medals. But it wasn’t. It was a picture of their long time rival, the Norwegian national team celebrating after having just beaten the USA in the 1995 World Cup.

In that locker room I learned that in order to become my very best — on the pitch and off — I’d need to spend my life letting the feelings and lessons of failure transform into my power. Failure is fuel. Fuel is power.