Stumbling Blocks Into Stepping Stones

In his talk, Until Seventy Times Seven, Elder Lynn G. Robbins spoke about mistakes. He spoke about how we make countless mistakes in our attempts to do basically anything and how those mistakes can teach us how to do better. "Hopefully," he said, "each mistake we make becomes a lesson in wisdom, turning stumbling blocks into stepping-stones." We can accomplish this by learning from our mistakes, examining how and why we made them, and learning how we can  recognize and avoid those kinds of mistakes in the future.

Continuing his talk, Elder Robbins spoke of a college professor who let his students retake exams after reviewing the material that covers the questions the students had gotten wrong. By doing so, this professor "inspired his students to keep trying—to consider failure as a tutor, not as a tragedy, and to not fear failure but to learn from it."

In life, we will face failures. As we try to be righteous, we will fail over and over and over again. Yet, we can learn from those failures and ultimately grow out of our mistakes. To do so, it helps to analyze our actions and the circumstances and choices that led up to them. That way, we can determine what went wrong and how we can do better. And that's what life is all about: learning how to do better. Our mistakes can help us do that, but only if we think of them as stepping stones rather than stumbling blocks.