We all make mistakes. They can be trivial or catastrophic, done in the heat of passion or due to naivete. Making mistakes is not a problem but seeing them in others and attempting to aggressively correct them is a major problem, one I've experienced myself and that I've actually caught myself doing.
I wrote elsewhere on the problem of the limbic system taking hold of the person's mental and emotional faculties. In short, when we feel threatened, we overreact and go temporarily blind in all senses of the word. When applied to others, especially younger ones who look up to us, this attitude results in a toxic, one-sided relationship.
A brief struggle for domination in such relationship ends with one of the persons, usually older, calling all the shots and micromanaging everything, while the other person, usually younger, doesn't have the freedom to make any mistakes.
The excuse by the dominator is that "it's for your own good", which is never the real reason. As the title explains, it's about stunting the younger person, since not being allowed to make mistakes results in less self-confidence, less ability to handle crises and so on. Situations such as the adult hawking over everything the child, screaming that it's done the wrong way and insisting the adult do it are painfully familiar to me.
The more I thought about this, the more I realized how many of my own problems were due to this phenomenon, not only when adults micromanaged and stunted me, but also when I was doing the same to others, especially young ones. This article then represents an attempt to explain what happened to me, as well as articulating how to extract maximum benefit for myself out of it.
It's true that learning can't happen without mistakes, but what I realized is that we can all learn from the mistakes of others. Instead of overcorrecting others, I could conceivably watch them without interfering and without any comments, so to see what I would do in their stead. That means that correcting others not only stunts their growth, but my own as well.
Extracting victory out of what initially seemed like an unfathomable defeat is my greatest delight. No matter what happened to me, I can always learn from it and project the universal insights, applying the timeless wisdom to all I do. This can hopefully someday lead to a change of my being, not one where I don't make mistakes, but one where I relish in making them and employ a myriad of methods to correct the fallout.