Selfalot

Daily Quote: “Most great people have attained their greatest success just one step beyond their greatest failure.” Napoleon Hill

The beginning is always difficult. Whatever you start doing from new and especially if it is a goal you have set yourself that you have never tried before, the early stages will be awkward and hard to work through.

Have you ever listened to somebody try their hand at playing a violin? This is probably the most difficult instrument to try to play. Any instrument where there is an invisible point at which the note is played, such as a violin that does not have the frets that a guitar has, will give the learner some horrific sounds to start off with.

You have to move your finger up and down the string to find where the note is hidden. The same applies to wind instruments that don’t have that many holes to cover. The note is determined by how much air you blow into the hole and at what pressure. That takes a lot of practice.

What about learning to drive a car or ride a bike, flying an airplane for the first time or trying to paraglide? What about paddling out to sea on a surfboard or falling off a windsurfer?

It takes a fair amount of failure to learn something new. Whether it’s learning a new language and trying to pronounce a foreign sound or learning a new skill such as baking and finding a black offering in the oven because you set the oven’s temperature too high. Trying something new can bring with it some spectacular failures.

As adults we find it very difficult to be seen to make mistakes. We hate it if somebody laughs at the weird sounds we make when trying to pronounce a new word in a foreign language.

We can’t cope if somebody ridicules us because we continue to fall off the bike or the surfboard. We somehow think we are less worthy as a person if we can’t do something well. So we give up at the first signs of failure. We do not fight our way through those first awkward steps.

If you experienced a really awful first day at work at your new job because you didn’t know what to do and nobody helped you then you will be less inclined to apply for new jobs as that awkward experience remains in your mind.

You tried your hand at making a video for YouTube and you get some nasty comments and criticism pointing out how badly made it was. You don’t make another video. You failed at your first webinar because you didn’t know how to use the technology and because only a few people signed in to it. So you don’t try again using better technology and marketing the webinar better.

You give up because in your mind it was embarrassing and you felt a failure. Sometimes these experiences are so powerful that we don’t listen to other people who tell you that you were in fact ok and that with just a few tweaks you could make a real go of it. In your mind you are convinced that this was the worst thing that could ever happen.

Everybody fails at the beginning when trying something new. We all have to work our way through those initial awkward moments. It’s the people that cope with those awkward moments and work through them that make it in the end.

People who work their way past these small failures are not necessarily more skilled than anybody else. They just put up with those bits of failure, learn from them and move on to the next step. Learn to do the same. It will make a huge difference to your personal development and the successes you are able to achieve.