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Mistake
Salad
By
Alan Cohen
A mother seeking to inspire her young son to progress with his piano
lessons took him to a concert by the famed virtuoso Ignacy Paderewski.
After the two took their seats, mom noticed a friend a few aisles away,
and went to chat with her.
When mother returned, she discovered her son was missing from his seat.
She began to search for him, but he was nowhere to be found. Suddenly
the house lights dimmed, the curtains parted, and a spotlight shined
on the gleaming Steinway piano on stage.
There, to the woman's horror, she saw her little boy sitting at
the keyboard, innocently picking out the notes to “Twinkle, Twinkle
Little Star.”
Embarrassed beyond words, she began to rush to the stage to retrieve
her mischievous little musician. Before she could get there, however,
the great piano master emerged from a stage wing and approached the
child. Paderewski leaned over and whispered in the boy's ear, “keep
playing.” Then he reached his arms around the boy's and added
a bass part with his left hand. With his right hand Paderewski improvised
a running obbligato. Together, the seasoned master and the young novice
turned a potential disaster into a triumph that inspired everyone.
Are you so sure your mistakes are just mistakes? Or could they be building
blocks to a success beyond any you imagined?
When my friend Dorothy goes home to visit her family each Thanksgiving,
her mother serves the traditional “mistake salad.” The dish
was born many years ago, Dorothy explains, when mother was using a cookbook
to make a salad. In the process, mother accidentally included half the
salad ingredients from a recipe on the left side of the open cookbook,
and half the ingredients from a different salad recipe on the opposite
page. Everyone enjoyed the salad so much that she continued to serve
it every year. So it was really no mistake at all.
Then there was the fellow named Alfred, who invented dynamite. When
Alfred's brother died, the city newspaper confused the two and printed
an obituary noting that the deceased's most notable act was the
creation of the explosive, subsequently adapted to manufacture bombs.
Stunned to consider that his name would forever be associated with destruction,
Alfred sought to leave a more positive legacy to humanity. So he instituted
a prize for people who contributed to world peace. Now the Nobel Prize,
established by Alfred Nobel, is the most coveted and respected award
in the world.
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