March 23rd: Do-Over Day

It's not officially recognized as a holiday yet, but we think that March 23rd should be designated as Do-Over Day.

Everybody on earth has experienced an Oops Moment--the second after they've made a stupid mistake. Everybody on earth, therefore, has experienced the desire for a do-over. If you had the chance to do it over again, optimism dictates that you'd get it right the next time.

We all need the chance to correct our mistakes, and nobody knew this better than a woman who was born on this day back in 1924. Bette McMurray married a fellow called Nesmith during the Second World War, had a son, and got divorced in 1946.

Like every single mother, she had an entire life to do-over--and she got good at it. To support herself and her young son, she became a bank secretary, where she often fell into the classic office-worker error--the typo. At the time, the only way to correct typing errors was to use a hard eraser to scrape off all the paper fibers infused with typewriter ink. This struck the freshly divorced Bette Nesmith as wrong-headed.

"An artist never corrects by erasing, but always paints over the error. So I decided to use what artists use. I put some tempera water-base paint in a bottle and took my watercolor brush to the office. I used that to correct my mistakes."

Tempera paint wasn't the best material for covering over typing errors, so Bette collaborated with her son Michael's chemistry teacher to come up with a better formulation. This new product didn't remain her secret weapon for long. Bette's colleagues began coming over to borrow her supply to correct their own errors. This gave Bette an even better idea. In 1956, she decided to sell her correction fluid commercially. She initially called it "Mistake Out", but when she went corporate with the product, she renamed it Liquid Paper. She ran that company for 23 years, grew it to a 200 person business selling 25 million bottles of product a year. Gillette liked it so much, they bought the company in 1979 for $47.5 million.

And things turned out well for Bette's son too. Less than a decade after she brought her product to market, her son Michael Nesmith also made his first fortune as a member of the prefabricated pop band the Monkees. He too became a master of the do-over. After a short stint just lip-syncing to other people's songs on the Monkees TV show, Nesmith began to write and record and perform his own material. When the band and the TV show that launched it went belly-up, his career did not. He continued to write and record his own material, and produce other people's too.

That's the story of one family's Do-Over success story. We're sure there are hundreds more. So we at Easterween earnestly recommend that we celebrate the Oops Moment today with renewed hope. For every dumb mistake we make, we all deserve a do-over. And if we play our cards right, we can do much better the second (and third, and fourth) time around.