Striving Towards Excellence

-Karthik Gurumurthy

“I was wrong. Forgive me.” I keep coming back to these words, because they are so simple to say and yet so hard to actually say out loud. It takes real courage to speak them plainly, without making excuses along the way. And the more I think about it, the more I believe this courage only comes to someone whose sense of self is already steady. It seems strange, but it is not the person who feels unsure of themselves who can admit fault easily. It is the person who feels secure. Someone unsure of their own worth guards it tightly, as if one mistake might break everything. Someone who feels secure has nothing to protect by denying the mistake.

This is part of why I think children should learn, from a young age, how to admit when they are wrong and ask for forgiveness. It might seem like this would make a child feel smaller or weaker. But I think it actually does the opposite. A child who learns early that mistakes can be named honestly, without shame, and then fixed, learns that their worth was never built on being perfect in the first place. That is not a weak foundation. It might be the strongest one a person can have.

When I ask myself why it is so hard to say sorry, the real answer usually has nothing to do with the mistake itself. It has more to do with a quiet fear underneath: what will they think of me now? If we ask this question too often, for too many years, it slowly turns into a kind of invisible control over our own lives, always checking what others might think. This is tiring in a way that is hard to explain, because it never really stops.

To ask for forgiveness is to step out of that pattern, even if just for a moment. It is not done to look good. In fact, it can look like weakness on the outside. But underneath, something important is happening. The person asking is choosing honesty over image, and those two things are not the same thing at all.

This brings me to the main point. Growing in your own eyes matters more, in the end, than growing in the eyes of others. What the world thinks of us keeps changing, depending on circumstances, moods, and things people don’t even fully know about us. We cannot control most of it. But the self we build by being honest with ourselves, by being willing to face our own mistakes, is something that belongs to us alone. No one can take it away, because it was never built on their approval in the first place.

And this is where I think the real danger lies. If someone spends their whole life managing how they look to others, while ignoring the quieter work of facing themselves honestly, there may come a day, later than they expect, when they finally have to ask: who have I actually become? By then, old habits of avoiding the truth may be so strong that facing it feels unfamiliar and difficult. This is why I think small moments, like saying “I was wrong, forgive me,” matter more than they seem to. It is not really about the apology itself. It is about practicing the habit of looking at yourself honestly, again and again, so that when bigger moments of truth arrive, you already know how to face them.