Mistakes

It is, at this point, cliche to say social media promotes a rather vapid, false narrative take on your daily life. Take the couple posting beautiful pictures from Dominican Republic. You would never know from these gorgeous photos that they were assaulted, stranded, AND ALMOST KIDNAPPED. Why? Because there's no real incentive to do so. There is, however, a tacit agreement amongst all of us on Insta and FB and, to a lesser extent, Twitter, that we will post stunning photos of homes, children, vacation, etc. My wife posted a picture of my son at the park yesterday. He is beautiful. Blue eyes ablaze, playing with sunscreen; the very picture of childhood glee. My kid, 3 seconds later, erupted in a ball of tears and screamed so loud that people in San Francisco heard him. We had to essentially kidnap him to get him out there because he was having his 29349294923th tantrum of the day. We are liars who call ourselves storytellers and everyone knows and it and no one says a word. I am telling you this will change soon. Come jump on the mistake train with me.

So many of us write we're "humbled" to receive an award while we post (brag about it) online. That kind of defeats the whole "humble" thing. Many others use "proud" "honored" "overwhelming" "stoked" etc to publicly join in on the congratulatory circle. You get the point. What's missing here? Mistakes. The daily, inevitable, productive, soul crushing and affirming reality of us consistently making mistakes. I'm all about mistakes. I make them. I write them down. I learn from them. I then hopefully make smaller mistakes and learn. I'm 13 years into the game and I still mess up. I forget to call back. I forget to email. I forget to schedule something. I make mistakes and so can you! There is no reason to hide any of this, and many, many reasons to proudly discuss it.

Let me ask you this-which post do you think would grab more attention?

• A insurance salesperson/broker/Tony Robbins-esqe "Coach" posting, again, how happy their clients are that they were able to get "y" done with the hashtag #happyclients or #allinadayswork
• A working mom/dad posting about the difficulties of getting a 3 year old to school while trying to make a meeting and missing the meeting.

Which one would you trust more? Which one would you relate to more? Which one would you connect with more? I would argue the latter. I would argue the latter because they are telling the truth. The unvarnished, no BS, life is hard but we're still getting it done truth.

I'm wrong more often than I'm right, so maybe I'm wrong about this, but we need to stop thinking that we have to post the positive in order to somehow grow financially or professionally. We have to stop saying how happy we are, if in fact we're not happy. Because it's absolutely fine to make mistakes and not be happy at many points in our lives. And it's healthy. And it's the truth. And people like the truth, no matter what the "like" tally is.

P.S. The idea of "happiness" is a very recent advent that has help sell millions upon millions of self help books