I have a prediction for the coming year. It’s funny how around this time people start looking at resolutions and promise certain behaviors, but I prefer to deal more in predictions. Especially those that I can be pretty sure I’m going to meet. And in this case, I know that this year there is one target I am very confident I am going to achieve.
I am going to royally screw some things up.
Which is honestly perfectly ok, and really freeing. A few years ago I decided to rent a cello to see if I really did want to play it, or if it just looked really cool but was not worth the amount of work I was going to have to put into it. Turns out that it was definitely the latter, and I sent that bad boy back within a couple of months, and it was made much easier by giving myself permission to turn it back in the moment I rented it.
It turns out that the freedom to fail is the greatest freedom of all.
In the entrepreneur world, there’s a saying that goes something like this. “What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?” Yet in reality that’s kind of dumb because unless something is so simple that success is a guarantee, there’s rarely a situation where you can’t fail, and anything you “guaranteed can’t fail” probably doesn’t have the power to change your life.
My goal for this coming year is about changing.
But for somebody like me, who is very high in need certainty, change can be really frightening, and I don’t really consider myself someone who’s very brave. Sure I have done some things in my life that looked courageous, like moving to an entirely different country or jumping out of a plane at 13,000 feet, but the truth is there have been so many things in my life that I have done while scared senseless.
So giving myself permission to fail is kind of a new sensation for me.
Some of the failures that I anticipate that could happen might be somewhat expensive. A couple of them might be fairly embarrassing. Yet I’ve come to the understanding that unless I am willing to risk failure, I’m never going to risk being successful.
And that the greatest risk of all is playing everything safe.
I’ve always been impressed by people who I thought were courageous, and who had the ability to take what looked to me to be significant risks. I never considered myself one of those people, and it was a stunning realization to come to the understanding that I am no different to them, other than they had come to a decision that I hadn’t reached yet.
Failure meant different things to them, and their greatest risk would have been doing nothing.
So this for me becomes a year of doing things differently, and taking the risks that I think will get me I want to be. But it’s also knowing that there are going to be some epic, epic failures along the way, and that I can learn from them and become different to who I am right now.
And knowing that I’ll be okay no matter what.
Because in the end, the person whose opinion I have to fear most of all is just my own. I know who I am; I know where I’ve come from. I know the things I faced, and the things I’ve run from. I’ve seen myself in the middle of some of my greatest victories, and I’ve seen myself in some moments where I was too scared to try.
Neither of those really matter.
What matters is that I can live with myself today, knowing that I’m doing the things that I want to do, or the things that I believe I should do. The more comfortable I am with risk, the more certain the possibility of success. Nothing is an absolute, nothing is guaranteed, except the guarantee of failure if I try nothing at all.
And that’s the one failure I can’t live with.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings