The Power of Negative Blogging

Making mistakes is a part of life. Learning from them is what’s important. Some people do and some don’t.

For example:

Word of the rattlesnake bite panicked Hunter’s neighbors at the Midpoint Place I condominiums more than his friends, who say the “Cobraman” has suffered vicious bites in the past and survived to tell about them.

When you play with snakes, you’re going to get bit. Obviously, this gentleman, or as I like to call him, “idiot”, didn’t learn from his mistakes. I only need to get bit by 1 rattlesnake to know that you don’t need one for a pet. Anti-venom shouldn’t be something you regularly keep in the medicine cabinet. But “Cobraman” was proud of his mistakes.

This is hardly the first time a snakebite has sent the Cobraman to the hospital. Hunter’s website, cobraman.net, chronicles his past bites with photos of himself in intensive care and close-ups of his own fingers, gnarled, swollen, discolored and bloodied from the bites of vipers, cobras and rattlesnakes.

He even states as clear as day on his website:

The one side effect of self immunization that is least desirable is that it tends to make you a bit complacent while handling (as those of you who know my bite record would attest to).

At some point you need to recognize you’re consistent mistakes as inability. Inability is actually okay. You don’t have to be good at everything. “Cobraman” obviously needs some more negative thinking in his life. Hopefully, before he ends up dead.

But even big companies, entire industries sometimes get stupid. Look at this from CNN.com:

What’s more, consumers and the people who market financial services to them may not have learned their lesson. Klaus-Peter Müller, CEO of Germany’s Commerzbank, told Fortune he was stunned on a recent trip to the U.S. to see TV ads still aggressively touting no-questions-asked credit.

If you continue to give credit cards to people who can’t afford to make the payments…they remarkably won’t pay. WHAT?! HOW CAN THAT BE?! Because they want people to miss payments so they can jack up the interest rates, so they poor schmuck who can’t pay, has to pay more. But they can’t PAY!! Thus, we have the potential for a scary credit card meltdown.

But sometimes, the general population doesn’t get it either. They won’t learn from mistakes because they want cheap products. That’s why we keep hearing about all the scary things coming from china.

Chinese Toys

Halloween items

Dog Food

I’m sure we’ll hear about something else the Chinese have tainted and we’ll be outraged, for a little bit. Then they’ll have tube socks for sale and we all forget.

And just because I didn’t do a media Monday yesterday, News organizations make mistakes as well. Mistakes like thinking this is news (From CNN.com):

In my line of work, I often deal with people who have (or claim to have) ghosts in their houses. Inevitably, most of them ask me what they should do about it. Should they move out? Should they talk to the specters, or just ignore them?

But the most common question I get is whether or not they should contact a ghost hunter to come to their houses and investigate.

Let me answer this one: No. You never have to pay a ghost hunter anything. Do you need to pay for Bigfoot hunters to search the woods near your home? Or alien hunters? Or someone to find the Loch Ness monster in your tub? No.

Making mistakes is part of the learning process. Repeating mistakes is what gets us into trouble. Never fear mistakes. But please learn from them when you do. Take a second to see what went wrong as well as what went right.

If you don’t, you’re making a BIG mistake!