Nimble Innovator - Opportunities for Improvement

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Nimble Innovator is a rather unassuming Magic: the Gathering card. A 2/2 for four, it is an especially weak creature for its mana cost. Usually, when a creature has a high cost and low power and toughness, you can expect it to have a good ability. Nimble Innovator's ability is “When Nimble Innovator enters the battlefield, draw card.” This basically means that your reward for playing Nimble Innovator is that it gives you the chance of drawing something better. And considering Nimble Innovator's value as a card on it's own, your odds of doing so are fairly good.

Yet the Innovator's flavor text suggests that it is undaunted by its relative weakness, and that it's confident that the card you'll draw from its ability will be a good one. In fact, its flavor text demonstrates a wise and plucky attitude that we could all benefit from developing:

“A failure is simply another opportunity for improvement. Just wait until you see what I come up with next.”

We all have many experiences that the Nimble Innovator would call “opportunities for improvement,” and I'm sure that's exactly what God designed them to be. God sent us here so we could learn and grow, and we gain more growth and experience from failure than from success. God doesn't want our failings to discourage us. Rather, He wants us to use them as opportunities to improve.

What most impresses me about the Innovator's attitude, however, is not his attitude toward failure, but rather his willingness to try again. When he says “Just wait until you see what I come up with next,” he says not only that he will try again, but also that he thinks he will see at least some success on his next attempt. Many people, after having failed, would come to expect more failure, and may even grow to believe that they are a failure. But the Nimble Innovator doesn't have that problem. Despite being a below-average card, he is not held back by a fear of not being able to measure up. Even after failure, the Nimble Innovator is willing, even eager, to make subsequent attempts. Were they not a nameless fictional character printed on a common collectible card, I would expect that the Nimble Innovator would go far in life.

I think that if we were to develop the Innovator's attitude by looking at failure as an opportunity to improve and being willing, if not eager, to learn and to try again, we will ultimately accomplish a lot more than the Innovator would in a Magic deck. We, too, may be fairly weak and unimpressive now, but if we learn from our failings and us them as opportunities to grow, we will eventually grow more capable than we could ever dream of being. We have infinite potential, and we achieve that potential by learning from our mistakes. We can learn from our failures. We can use them. We can take advantage of our “opportunities for improvement” until we reach the point where improvement is no longer needed. I believe that if we adopt the Nimble Innovator's attitude toward failure, failure will no longer be such a negative experience for us, and over time, we will grow to experience it less frequently until we no longer experience it at all.