This is Mount Everest. Standing on the border separating China and Nepal, it is the highest peak in the world. Snowy and steep, it is difficult to climb, to say the least. Yet, there have been humans, so minute in comparison, that have risen to the occasion and conquered this monument of nature in a testament to human strength and willpower.

This entry, however, has absolutely nothing to do with that.

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In life, one of the most-repeated mantras go something along the line of "Learn from your mistakes", "Be clever, learn from the mistakes of others", "Fool you once, shame on me. Fool you twice, shame on you" and "England will win the World Cup."

If such statements were true, then I would've spread a wealth of knowledge through the world, since I make more mistakes in a day than Jessica Simpson would make in a Primary 4 science test. The opposite, however, seems to happen, since I appear to make people around me dumber by the second, to the point that their IQ drops lower to whatever Paris Hilton can count to. I would've said Jessica Simpson again, but I don't know how good her maths is. I mean, she has to be good at something. And besides, I've seen people fall for the same trick countless times, and I'm sure you have too. If you've done it to teachers, they've fallen for it. As a result, such statements prove to be questionable in truth, dubious in nature, irrelevent in usage and always useless. Ecspecially the one about England.

In fact, the reason that people don't learn from their mistakes is that they don't realise it when they're making them. This is because of other terms such as "Luck is given to those who need it" and "God helps his fools, donkeys, retards and Wayne Rooneys", which mean that every person, no matter how evil, annoying, crappy, unlucky, will still stand to enjoy a certain degree of success in life. Which also means that you can lead a life littered with mistakes and still get along fine. This means that you can go on a happy streak of success only to come crashing down like Bush's foreign policies when Lady Luck decides that hauling your ass out of the gorge time and time again is hard and unpaid work and just decides to let you fall.

Edit : Firefox just crapped out on me, so I lost half the post at this point. So everything after this is retyped with frustrated fingers and may hence sound unreasonable, angsty, brainless or downright boring. Think Xiaxue.

This isn't to say that it's completely the person's fault, and he should be condemned and banished to a eternity where all he does is eat apple seeds and listen to Numa Numa over and over again. After all, when you succeed, you're obviously doing something right, so changing the way you do things would obviously endanger that. As a result, when encountered with a similar dilemma, the brain (or in some cases the vacuum) would send a message in a bottle, smoke signals and light flares to the other parts of the body to recreate a similar scenario to deal with said problem. This, however, isn't an excuse to be stupid, however tempting it may be.

This is where memory and alertness comes in. Since we assume that there is always room for improvement, and if you disagree you are a pompous prick who proves me right anyhow, you would then be able which part of the procedure, procure, cedure or manicure actually served as a setback rather than a boost, a lift rather than a scramble, a boon rather than a screwup, a Steven Gerrard rather than a Craig Bellamy, a cameraman rather than a Lindsay Lohan, a tomato rather than a tomato said in Chinese. You get the idea.

Which is why it's kind of sad that people waste no time in incorrectly pointing fingers at whatever they don't like to blame their failure on, failing again in not recognising that the agonising part may or may not be a necessary evil. After all, seeing ugly girls make you appreciate the pretty ones around more. In a way, unless the pretty girls have minds about as cognitive as a leftover car from the Flintstones.

Note to self : always write in notepad first.