Image by Orin Zebest via Flickr
Don’t fail whatever you do.
If you listen to the popular media, they would have you believe that the worst thing you can do is fail. It is far better to stay home under the covers than to get our of bed and try to do something. Fear of failure is endemic. Fear of success is no less bad but we will just have to save that for another day.
You don’t earn your stripes as a Cantankerous Old Coots without failing big time. And not just once, but over and over again. It’s just human nature to hate failure. Nobody wants to fail. If expected to fail you wouldn’t put in the effort. Still the world is full of failure and the truth that nobody wants to hear is that failure deserves to be celebrated because it is the one sure way to learn success.
If you watched a baby learn to walk, this truth is apparent. The baby fails again and again learning something new with each failure. Then miraculously, the baby stands. Something tells the baby that this is the right process. There is no expectation of instant success and, in fact, without the lessons from all the failures, the baby would never be able to stand.
Somehow this obvious lesson gets drummed out of us when we grow up. We expect and demand instant success. And then give up when we fail,
FailFaireDC: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Failure
This weeks news story celebrates failures. FailfairDC is am opportunity to appreciate how much you can learn from a good failure. This conference provided ten examples of failures. One of life’s lessons is that success is built on failure and that so long as you don’t give up it is just a part of the process. If you haven’t seen much success in your life so far, the answer may be simple. Maybe you haven’t failed often enough.
I fail to get your point. Sorry, couldn’t help myself with that one. Good stuff. Failure is just natures way of tellin’ ya ‘something ain’t working’. And if ya listen, you find out, and if you’re willing to go so far as to change, why it must be magic; things start to work better. Amazing.
Hansi,
Spoken like a true failure.