Celebrating The Fails
It’s not a question of IF you
fail. You are going to fail.
It’s how you get back up that really matters.
If you're striving for success in the gym, in your career, in your relationships, failure is a requirement. Instead of chasing perfection and getting frustrated if you don't get it right the first time, use these "failures" as a way to learn.
This mentality trickles into all that we do. If you let fears of not wanting to look uneducated, unexperienced or constantly trying to live up to others' expectations, it can cause paralysis.
Simply, the more work your pump out, the more times your try, the more chances you take, the more likely you will get it right.
There are so many examples of this. Think of all the shots a professional basketball player has missed in their life, all the prototypes Apple has thrown out. They didn't try once then chalk it up to a failure. Perhaps one of my favorite stories about this is from Art & Fear, introduced to me by Justin Su’a:
“ a ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. (One group) would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, (the other group) solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A".
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."
So, How are you going to fail today?
Lets get to work.