What’s something that scares you the most? For some it’s public speaking, for others, it’s being alone, and for some, it’s the fear of failure. It seems like we’re too afraid to fail and too scared to show our flaws or imperfections. But that’s not life, that’s not real. What if, and just go with me on this, what if when we fail, we succeed?
You’ve heard it before: “What would you do if you knew you could not fail?” Ugh, I despise that question. And even though it makes perfect sense on a motivational poster, what if it actually demotivates us? Of course, you’d try anything and everything if you knew you could not fail! And while the whole concept is ideal, I postulate that the reason we don’t try is that we are worried we will fail. I know some people who are afraid of a project failing, so they never start. I call it the “analysis paralysis.” We feel so burdened by all of the possibilities that we opt never to try one and move on to the next. We’ve become so paralyzed, so fearful of failure, that we don’t see it as what it is meant to be – a possibility. What’s that saying? “The possibilities are endless.” It’s true, and so are failures.
I remember the first day of English my sophomore year in high school. My teacher greeted everyone with “Good morning, and welcome to English – at some point in this class; I hope you all fail.” As a fairly decent student, I remember thinking to myself that this woman had lost all her marbles! Here we have a teacher, whose purpose is to educate the next generation of great thinkers, hoping we fail?! Not until later did I understand what she meant. She wanted everyone to fail because at that point something magical happens – you learn.
Believe it or not, what if I told you that you have failed thousands upon thousands of times in your life already? I guarantee there’s an embarrassing home video of you learning to walk because there is nothing funnier than watching a wobbly toddler bobbing around milk drunk, and then falling down. But then what happens? They get back up. And they try again. And they get better. Whether it’s crawling, walking, riding a bike, reading, or writing, no one is perfect when they start.
Taking the notion that no one is perfect, what if we could own our imperfections? And in our imperfections, what if we tried new things? And by trying new things, what if we fail? Wait, what if we fail? So, what?!?! The best part about trying new things is figuring out what you like, what you don’t like; what you’re meant to do, what you’re not meant to do; what potential you have in something you had no idea existed. There’s freedom in failure. There’s self-discovery.
Next time you fail, don’t think of it as a setback. Think of it as a fail forward. You’ll be happy you tried and failed.
