Failure or never trying? You all know the answer, but I thought that it would be interesting digging into the reasoning a wee bit more.
“It doesn’t matter if you come from the inner city. People who fail in life are people who find lots of excuses. It’s never too late for a person to recognize that they have potential in themselves.”
Benjamin Carson
When you try something for the first time do you expect to be a runaway success at it? Unless you are extremely gifted and possessed with more than a bit of good luck, you are going to have to spend time learning before you can become adept at something.
The greatest teacher that you will ever have is experience, but in order to gain experience you have first to gain some, and that means trying.
If you never try at anything then you will never succeed at anything.
“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might have well not lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.”
J. K. Rowling
Is there anyone on this planet no matter how active or retiring a life they lead, no matter what point of history they were born in, who has not, at some point put their foot in it? I don’t think so.
I can appreciate how if you’ve had setbacks you might be reluctant to try again, that’s fair enough as no- one wants to fail at anything, but given that we are only human, it happens.
I can appreciate that an individual’s experiences as a child or a teenager could hold them back. If they had bad experiences and never got over them, if they never learnt to build their confidence then yes that will hold them back, but only if they choose to let it happen.
Before I went to college I was an introvert, I would always keep myself to myself, by the time that I left everyone knew me as Mad Mike, I had been the Student Union Vice President and for some reason which I’m still not too sure about, I even ran for the National NUS presidency. My campaign for the national presidency was awful, I didn’t get the job but that doesn’t matter, at least I tried, and in the process I really connected with a lot of people.
No matter how shy, how nervous or how downright terrified you are of something, you have to take that leap of faith, you have to believe in yourself otherwise what kind of life will you lead?
If you hide away from the world, if you let everyone else do your thinking for you then you don’t have a life, you have an existence. There will come a point when you look back at what you have done with your life, what would you think of yourself if all that you saw was a person who had never tried?
“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Michael Jordan
Whilst it can be annoying, it really doesn’t matter how many times that you fail, just so long as you keep trying, because every time that you try you will learn some more and at some point you will have accumulated enough knowledge and experience to succeed.
Obviously there will be times when it’s not viable to continue or maybe fresh and more relevant opportunities will appear, but until that happens how will you know what’s possible and what’s not until you actually try.
One thing that I’ve noticed over the years is that there are times when I’ve been muttering a choice selection of phrases as to how there was no way that I would be able to do that task, there have been times when my system has been awash with adrenalin before I’ve had to speak in public or to take the lead in something, but once I take action and do what’s been causing me all the angst I’ve habitually discovered that there was nothing to get wound up about.
The unknown can be a scary thing, but once you start doing whatever it is, it’s no longer the unknown and it doesn’t take long before it becomes familiar.
In case I forget later, and this is something that I’ve, for good reason, mentioned a few times before, you need to beware of getting bogged down in the detail. It can be far too easy to hold off taking action until everything has been prepared and perfected right down to the last punctuation mark, and whilst that can become a great excuse not to try, it can also be a serious problem. The solution is simple. Once you know what you need to do then do it, you can fine tune things later but the important thing is that you DO!
There are two ways that you could try. You could take the considered approach where you think about what you are doing and where necessary you plan things out; and then there’s the jump in feet first and hope for the best approach.
Obviously jumping in feet first can cause you problems but on the plus side it can be a great way to gain experience perhaps a wee more rapidly than you would like. The best way forward is to plan, but there will be times when you need to take swift action so get into the habit of knowing what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and at what stage you are, that when life decides to have some fun with you, you won’t need to consider your options because you’ll know what you need to do.
I’ll concede that there may be times where taking the softly, softy approach and avoiding action might be the right thing to do, but that’s something that you need to be wary of doing as the odds favour such a move costing you opportunity.
No one wants to fail but the vast majority of times it’s not the end of the world, you learn and you move on. Given that failure tends not to be the end of the world there is no need to beat yourself up about it, it just wastes your time and stops you from moving forward, things happen, the important thing is that you did everything that you could to achieve a positive outcome.
One thing worth bearing in mind is that just because you failed it does NOT mean that you are a failure. The brightest minds throughout history have failed many times, and if they have no problem with it then neither should you! Failure is not an excuse to stop trying, and the fear of failure is not an excuse not to try. Failure adds to your knowledge, failure allows you to refine your approach, and the lessons from your failures are what will enable your successes.
The history books are full of people who tried and failed, dusted themselves off and kept trying until they succeeded. Such things as light bulbs, flight, horseless carriages, space exploration, medical advancement, computers and communication, the people have and continue to develop these areas didn’t get it right the first time, but they kept trying, experimenting and believing in themselves.
If no one ever tried then what kind of world would we have today?
When you know what doesn’t work then you can fix it and tweek it until it does.
This behaviour is most apparent in children, but have you noticed that when people fail that self-defence mechanism that we had as a child comes in to play. This is a bit of a generic thing to say, but I suspect that at some point we’ve all been guilty of this. We try to deny responsibility, we try to cover things up, we come up with endless excuses, of course it wasn’t our fault, we can even try to what we’ve done to ourselves.
When you can no longer accept responsibility for your own actions then you know that you’ve stopped trying. A little bit of backsliding shows that you’re only human, but if it’s become a regular habit then you are no longer trying to push ahead and pursue your dream, your mind has become something that’s programmed into berating the cruel world for not handing you everything on a plate.
Failure matters. Failure can wake you up, it makes you more aware of market conditions, it can motivate you, and most important of all it will get you back on track.
“If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sure sign that you’re not trying anything very innovative.”
Woody Allen
If you never fail then the odds are that you are living a safe and secure life, almost as if you are hiding away from who you are because the thought of failure scares you, maybe you lack confidence in yourself, or maybe it’s because you’ve forgotten how to dream.
Personally I don’t care if I fail because it shows that I’m trying and that I’m doing something with my life, rather than let it drift past me whilst I watch the T.V or play computer games.
Here’s a question for you, if you knew for certain that you wouldn’t fail, what would you try to achieve? And having decided what you would try for, why not give it a go anyway…
As you’ve probably guessed, I’m in favour of trying because apart from it making life infinitely more interesting for you, it’s the only way that you can achieve anything and it’s the only way that you are ever going to find out who you are. There is no law that says that you have to try, and it could be that you’ve reached a level that you are happy with, but if you never try then your life is going to be one of regret, of watching those around you move on with their lives whilst yours is held in stasis.
You will never know just what is possible until you try. You might have to experiment with a multitude of approaches before you achieve success, but if success is achievable then you will get there, the only question is when.
It’s true that you might put a huge amount of yourself into what you do only to find that success is not realistically possible, does this mean that you’ve wasted your precious time and resources? No of course it doesn’t! Even if success eludes you, you will have learnt valuable lessons which will have developed the unique individual that you are.
It could be said that the time that I spent trying to get the qualifications to enter vet school was a waste of time, I disagree, it helped to develop me into who I am, and it also gave me some memorable memories from helping out at a local rural veterinary practice.
To try or not to try, that is the question. Here’s a question for you to think about. Dr Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with ALS shortly after his 21st birthday, what would have happened if he had said I don’t want to try anymore?