Cath Duncan from mineyourresources.com made a comment a while back on one of my blogposts (What all the “get rich” Blogs don’t tell you) I’d going to have a closer look at today:
I totally agree that action is what makes the difference in results – even imperfect action. In improv storytelling they have the mantra “it’s all about having as many goes as possible, rather than trying to have 1 perfect go,” and I think this is a great mantra for life, and one of the foundational ideas in Agile Living. – Cath
If you’ve been reading about personal development for a while this will sound very familiar. It’s true in all paths of life actually. Practice makes perfect but better yet failure is the way to perfection as paradoxical as it might seem at first glance.
Embrace failure as the path to success and don’t get paralyzed by your thoughts while waiting for things to unfold and happened like you want them to. They almost never happen like you thought they would.
Failure to meditate
Somehow this all makes me thing of my every day practice of meditation. More often than not it seems a total waste of time. I’m sitting there and thinking of all sorts of things while counting my breaths on auto pilot. The thought crosses my mind to just get up and stop this charade. Stop pretending to be meditating and doing it perfectly. But you know what. I’m actually meditating, although not perfectly. I just fake it untill I make it. There you have it. My meditation is fake, I’m a fraud, I’ve been meditation for little over a year now, spending roughly 130 hours in meditation so far. Can I call myself an expert on the subject? Hardly… Have I failed miserably to meditate the way I want to be meditating? Most certainly!
You could call me an expert at failure. I have over 130 solid hours of failure under my belt, and that’s only in meditation. Or you could call my entire life a failure, in which case I’ve had over 2 million hours worth of experience on the subject. By Malcom Gladwell’s 10,000 hour theory I’m an expert at failure many times over.
And guess what, so are you!
The expert failure
Yes my dear reader, you’re an expert at failing. That’s the bonus of not being content with your own life and reading about personal development and lifestyle design. You wouldn’t be reading about these things if you were totally content with your life now would you?
What’s the value you might think by now, why is being an expert failure useful in my life. Well, the failures we had in our early days were simple: If we failed in staying upright we might bump our heads. Later if we failed to write legible we could fail a test. Failing to apply the brakes when driving created a nice dent in the car. A simple failure got bigger and bigger consequences over time as we got better at spotting what could go wrong. By the time you graduated you had enough experience in failure to spot things before they went wrong and correct them.
If you didn’t learn from mistakes you’d be wearing a crash helmet, not be allowed to drive, couldn’t complete an education and certainly couldn’t develop your person or design your lifestyle. Your life might not be perfect right now, but be happy about it. Perfection would mean you can’t learn anything anymore and what a bore that would be.
- Embrace failure, it’s your best friend in life. Seek imperfection in everything you do. Learn from it and be happy that you failed.
More blogposts, related to this subject:
This is one very deep and thoughful post about accepting the unperfection of life and turning a bad thing (failure) into a good one (expertise). Your “failure” at meditation must have something to do with this insight.
Really good post Christiaan. I especially like where you said “Things almost never happen like you thought they would”. If you can accept that, and the failure that can go along with it, then you are way ahead of the game when it comes to moving on and making real forward progress.
BTW congrats on your ever-increasing amount of page views!
Great stuff! I’ve always had an intellectual understanding that failure is part of learning, but I usually found ways to avoid failing in any significant way. And this was obviously a useful success strategy – to achieve a certain amount of success at least. But it’s a VERY hard work way to achieve success because it involves loads of preparation. And there’s a cap on how much success you can handle when you do it that way, because you can’t be agile, intuitive and trusting of your unconscious abilities.
These days I’ve begun to realise this idea much more deeply, and I find that through letting go (and embracing the risk in letting go), I can be more. It’s the reason why I chose a dandelion as my logo image for my business – dandelions thrive by being willing to stand tall in the wind, and rather than trying to prevent, avoid or stop the wind, they just stand tall and use the wind to their advantage – and they become more by being willing to let go of their seeds into the wind, not knowing which won’t survive and which will thrive.
On our Agile Life call this week, Cody McKibben shared something that Ramit Sethi taught him to do: keep a file of your failures and aim to get at least 3 to 5 new failure items in your file each day. I love this idea – it really helps to take an intellectual appreciation of failure and convert it into a deeper understanding of appreciating, accepting and even celebrating failure. in fact, it turns it completely on it’s head and makes failure a success!
Thanks for raising this important theme, Christiaan – and thanks for the mention of my previous comment: glad it stimulated this post!
Cath
Nice post, and certainly very true. Just a short comment on this one:
It took Thomas Edison more than one thousand attempts to make a lightbulb. Folks asked him: ‘So, you kneeded a thousand tries to invent a lightbulb?’.
Thomas replied: ‘No. I have found more than a thousand ways how NOT to make a lightbulb.’
And therefore the phrase ‘Failure is not an option’ is completely untrue. Because sometimes, failure is the best option.