We all make bad decisions.  It happens every day.  But there’s a difference between a bad decision and a life-defining and history-altering mistake.  Bad decisions are “I think I’ll have another slice of cake please” or “I think my wife will love getting this aerobics video for her 40th birthday!”  Those are bad decisions.  But these are horrible mistakes:

• Ignoring the warnings and scraping your ship against an iceberg while carrying more than 2200 passengers (see RMS Titanic)

• Having a few drinks while driving an oil tanker and spilling 760,000 barrels of oil into the ocean (see Exxon-Valdez)

• Doing whatever Tiger Woods did back in 2009 and altering the trajectory of his life and of the sport of golf forever

It’s tough to recover from those kinds of mistakes.  Those are the ones that you’ll probably spend the rest of your life trying to recover from.

How about mankind as a whole?  What’s our greatest mistake?  Aside from Adam and Eve and their big no-no back in the Garden of Eden, what’s the biggest mistake we’ve ever made?