I’ve told this story before, but I’ll share it here again.
Two days before my bar mitzvah, I did my final rehearsal at the synagogue. I’d spent months working on my Torah portion, practicing in a language I could read but didn’t fully understand. The day of the rehearsal, I screwed up a line — and completely lost it. I started crying, ran to the bathroom, and locked myself inside.
I was 13 years old, and terrified of screwing up in front of all of my family and friends. And since this was the first of the Oshinsky bar mitzvahs, there were going to be several hundred people in attendance. I was scared of looking dumb in front of all of them.
But the rabbi had good advice. He told me: If you screw up a line, it’s OK! Just go back to the beginning of the line, and read it all over again. Nobody will ever notice.
He was absolutely right. Of the several hundred people in attendance, there wasn’t a single one who spoke Hebrew fluently. (Perhaps a few dozen could read Hebrew, but none could’ve translated what I was saying into English.) Which meant that when I did mess up on the day off, I followed the rabbi’s instructions: I went back to the beginning of the line and read it again. Nobody noticed — mostly because nobody else had spent the previous nine months learning and rehearsing a single Torah portion.
I’ve had the same thing happen when giving a big presentation. I’ll have rehearsed and practiced, but then I’ll flub a line or forget to cover a specific slide. My first reaction is often to beat myself up for making a mistake. But the truth is, only I knew how things were supposed to go.
So when it happens, I let the mistake go, and move on. The truth is, the only person who even noticed was me.
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That’s a photo from my bar mitzvah, back in May 2000.