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Life Isn’t a Dress Rehearsal, It’s a Live Performance

Your life is unscripted and you’re the author

Tom Stevenson
2 min readFeb 16, 2021
Photo by 董 博儒 on Unsplash

Before a show, actors will perform numerous rehearsals to iron out the kinks in their performance.

They’ll rehearse their lines, discuss ways to improve the show and get the chance to act out the performance from start to finish.

When the curtains go up on opening night, they’re ready to go with no question about what they have to do.

Life is a little different.

We don’t get to rehearse our lines, or the chance to smooth out our rough edges. We have to perform live from the day we’re born to the day we die.

Mistakes are common. Moments we look back on with regret are rife. But is this so bad?

Failure is the greatest teacher. In an imperfect world, a perfect performance is impossible. Even stalwarts of the stage and screen can slip up after hours of preparation.

The beauty of life is that we’re all a work in progress. When questioned how he created the famous sculpture of David from a block of marble, Michelangelo replied, “I removed everything that isn’t David.”

We should all adopt Michelangelo’s response as we progress through life. All our imperfections, all our mistakes are teachable moments from which we learn and grow.

Sanitising our lives with rehearsal after rehearsal makes live stale and boring.

The best moments are the unscripted ones, the encounters we didn’t rehearse.

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