overcoming failure is getting to be fashionable

it’s interesting how many twitter tweets there are these days re: webpages and blogs that talk about overcoming failure.

There is a fairly common theme to these posts, which is “I never experienced failure before . . .”

Well this is technically incorrect.  no one who can walk or talk is a stranger to failing.  it’s just that we learned to associate “failure shame” with certain social situations.    So here is my response:

where did we acquire fear of failure?  it’s not intrinsic– toddlers learning to walk have no fear of failing (or climbing a counter to get a cookie), they just focus on getting what they want til they get it.

Fear of failure is not fear of the failure itself; if it was, no one would ever do a crossword or sudoku puzzle ever again.  what happens is, we learn to be afraid of what other people think of us when we display imperfection.  We associate shame with failing to meet some arbitrary standard within a limited time frame.  THAT is what we fear.   it’s not about the event, it’s about the social consequences.

failure is always an arbitrary judgment made in the context of arbitrary time limits.

what’s worse, in school we learn primarily to avoid “failure” (i.e., the resulting shaming disapproval from authority for not doing tasks perfectly), rather than failure recovery, which would make us more independent.  I have never seen a bureaucracy teach independence.  only in sports do we teach a few kids how to recover from failure.

what is going to happen from this current momentous collective economic experience is that a lot of people are going to rise from the ashes of their first real “failure” (i.e., deviation from meeting outside standards) and find inner resources they never knew they had.  once inoculated, the fear of failure will leave them, and with that will come new and far greater personal empowerment.

I’m all for failure.  failure is good.  people who don’t know failure have never tried to do anything really hard.  they exaggerate its power.  I love failure, i expect failure, because it is a predictable temporary by-product of doing something really worthwhile.

I am a successful self-publisher only because i failed miserably at it several times first.  now, I look around and see so many people trying to avoid failure in reaching a high goal, but the only way to do avoid failure is to follow a known path, which assures mediocrity . . . and . . .  failure.

If you have failed at something and still kept at it til you succeeded, congratulations.  That has more meaning to me and my spirit than all the perfectly-followed-the-procedure-laid-out-for-me failure avoidance in the world.

(c)  Justin Locke

www.justinlocke.com