"There's always a chance to get restarted to a new world, new life, scarred but smarter." - Drivin' N' Cryin', Scarred but Smarter
I make myself look like an idiot all the time. Nearly everyone does at some point in their life. I'm human, I make mistakes -- and making mistakes isn't necessarily a bad thing if you learn from them. That's the trick. Some people say in life that there are no second chances. I think that there are more second chances in life than you could possibly count, if you know where to look. You encounter many of them every day. When I make a minor mistake, I can many times get a second chance, and when I do I try to learn from my mistake from before. In this way, I can avoid making the bigger mistakes later on that I can't have a second chance on. (click below to read more)
A good example of this is my last term as Senior Patrol Leader in my boy scout troop, when I was essentially running the troop from the boys' perspective. I had several responsibilities - some large, some smaller - and I so often got bogged down with the large ones that I completely forgot about the easier but more obsolete ones, such as updating the calendar on the troop website with what was happening every meeting. I hardly ever did that. By the time I realized by mistake, my term was nearly at an end, so I didn't have a chance to correct by error, but I came away from that situation knowing that in this coming leadership position, I need to write down all of my duties somewhere where I would see them frequently, so that I won't forget anything.