Daily Quote: “I wasn’t afraid to fail. Something good always comes out of failure.” Anne Baxter
Whatever happened to that famous saying, if at first you don’t succeed try and try again. Yet how afraid are we of failing? We do not even start on a new adventure because we do not want to fail.
Try for a different job? Oh no, can’t do that. Take a different route, cook a new meal, experiment with new seeds, learn to ride a motorbike, work out how to use e-mail. Never. Can’t do any of that.
If we do not have the courage to try out small things such as using a computer. How then can we even consider the courage it takes to leave one career and start something totally different? Or to learn Mandarin and work in China, or to volunteer to work in Rwanda.
What about the courage to start running for a marathon. Or add swimming and cycling to your running to try your hand at a triathlon. What about finding a new hobby such as paragliding, or wind surfing, or even just playing chess? How many of these activities make you tremble with fear?
Yet, for each one of these activities and challenges there are many tiny steps of trial and error that will get you there. You don’t need to immediately enter a marathon. You can run a few 5km races first. In fact you don’t even need to run, you can take part in walks. Try out little events and build up to the full one.
All it takes is for you to have the courage to fail once in a while. Take some time to learn to pronounce that Mandarin word, or learn to write a character. You will get it wrong many times because it is so different to your western language and alphabet. But what a wonderful feeling when you get it right because you know you have achieved something big.
Didn’t quite finish that first marathon? You will have learnt from the experience. You will have learnt that you didn’t drink enough, shouldn’t have run in new shoes, needed to take plasters to stop the chafing, a hat to keep yourself cool, more training and better nutrition. There will be many new lessons. And some of those lessons will extend further than your running. They will be life lessons that will help you in other areas of your life.
Regrettably we start off our learning life realising that failure is bad for us. When we fail at school we are punished. We might be moved to another class, or even have to repeat the year. We certainly will not get the certificate that the person who came first got.
If we fail at school we will not be asked to make the final speech. We will not have our name on a plaque in the entrance. We will not play in the first team and we have no chance of attending a good University. Failing at the subject of school is not good for you.
Regrettably the work environment is seldom any different. You don’t get promotion if you lose a big sale or a big customer. You are not encouraged to fail at anything. And the people who get promoted are usually the ones who have less failures.
With this kind of learning, it’s hardly surprising that we don’t try out new things or challenge ourselves to reach loftier goals. Failure is bad. Can’t do failure. So we don’t even try. Holding ourselves back because of fear of failure is the ultimate failure.
