If you think about it, we more or less spend the entirety of our time in school learning to think of failure as a bad thing. From the time we enter school to the time we graduate high school and potentially go on to college and other higher education, our success in school is based pretty much entirely around having the best grades possible. We are rewarded for good grades by titles like valedictorian and scales like the GPA. Folks with low grades are awarded with low GPAs and even face the possibility of having to repeat a year. Whether it's conscious or subconscious (or both), this instills a fear of failure and implies that perfection is the standard. At the very least, it makes us want to avoid failure. The truth is, living like this is totally unreasonable because failure is just part of the deal. The beauty of what I do is that the only way to get this far is to both fail and address how you perceive failure.
Fear of Failure May Keep You From Ever Starting
Let's say you want to start a business, but you're afraid to fail. It's a perfectly valid fear, especially if you're investing a significant sum of money into starting it. For some people, that fear of failure might keep them from ever starting that business. For others, it might mean that so much time is spent trying to perfect the product that someone else beats them to the market. This applies to so many other ventures, but the point is that at some point it's best to just get started. You'll learn along the way how to improve whatever it is that you're doing.
Failure Opens Room for Improvement
If you believe that you can't fail, what you really believe is that you've achieved perfection in whatever skill or profession in which you believe you can't fail. In music for example, you might believe that you have mastered an instrument or performed a piece perfectly. That's great, but at the end of the day what you're really doing is closing yourself off to further improving your skills. If there's anything I've learned from what I do or what I have done in the past, it's that there is always room to grow. By closing yourself off, you may unintentionally be creating road blocks for yourself going forward.
To Fail is to Learn
Instead of beating yourself up for failing or looking for something or someone to blame, why not just ask yourself what you learned from the process? A few years ago, I failed my CFI check ride. At first I was pretty pissed with myself, mostly because it was going to cost a lot more money to finish the test than I had initially planned. Eventually, I decided to go back and ask myself what I learned from the experience. Turns out, in my rush to plan for the test, I had missed preparations for an entire segment of the test. It was a great lesson in the importance of both attention to detail and slowing down. I spent the whole evening preparing that segment of the test, and went back the next day and passed the check ride.
Conclusions
If you ask any successful person if they've ever failed, they'll say yes. If they say no, they're probably lying about it. Einstein said that if someone has never made a mistake, they've never tried anything new. And he was right. So get out there and try something new! It's better to try and fail than to look back years from now and regret that you never tried at all. In fact, never trying at all might just be the only thing that is truly considered failing.
Notes
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