And other things.
I was catching up with a friend on Twitter, and she mentioned to me how she needed to execute on her projects more and do some writing and shooting (she is an aspiring producer), but the main thing that keeps tripping her up was the idea of failure. She was so scared of failing she would sabotage herself before she could even get started.
But that’s nonsense.
You need failure. How else are you going to learn. Embrace failure as a key part of the process. Failure is how you get feedback. Failure forces change. School teaches us that we need to have all the answers up front. We need to be perfect. But we are just not perfect, we don’t have all the answers, we don’t even know what we don’t know. So you have to try stuff, and that stuff will probably fail. But you will learn something and then you will try again. And if you try enough times, eventually something will stick, you will taste success.
This doesn’t mean don’t be prepared though. Do your homework, do your research, learn as much as you need to. But add a generous dose of action to all that learning. In fact the action is a huge part of the learning. The doing makes your efforts tangible, it makes the journey to your goal more visceral.
We get too preoccupied with succeeding or being perfect. We are scared of getting dirty, we are scared of the mess. Our focus should be on the process. The doing is what’s important, the doing is your spiritual practice. If you focus on getting the day to day right, letting each swing rip, each stroke in, You will work your way past many ‘failures’ into success.
Don’t let the fear of failure stop you. Don’t let the need for perfection cripple you. Let failure be your teacher. Let failure lead you to your eventual success.
