THE FEAR OF FAILURE
I never understand why people are so scared to fail. There's nothing wrong with being scared. I'm scared of a lot of things. Things like spiders, pigeons flying into me, Beetlejuice (which is not a type of juice, but a creepy film character that still haunts my dreams to this day). One thing I'm not afraid of is failure. It's easy for me to say this because I fail at things every day. I'm used to it now. Failure is something I've forced myself to be ok with because I realised early on that I'd never achieve anything in life without it. If you succumb to your fear of failure it can be paralysing. It'll stop you from doing anything worth doing.
I've let this specific type of fear hold me back in the past. I stayed in a terrible job that I hated for way too long because I didn't think I was good enough to get a better job. I thought I was lucky to have the job that I had, let alone be fortunate enough to get another one. It wasn’t until I sunk so low & felt like I had nothing to lose that I started applying for other jobs.
"All they can say is no & I'd be in the same position as I started anyway, so why not"
"At least I would've tried to change my life, trying is better than doing nothing"
Those were some of the things I remember telling myself as I began to cultivate a mental shift towards owning failure. To my amazement, 2 weeks & 3 interviews later I got a much better job in the best practice anyone could hope to work in. I'm making this process sound much easier than it was though. The first interview was a shambles. I became super nervous as I went in & must have come across as I nervous wreck. My voice kept quivering as I was answering questions. My hand kept shaking. I put way too much importance on that individual interview. As a result, I went into fight or flight mode. This was because in my mind I built this up as my only opportunity to get out of my current situation. It was my only arranged interview at the time & as far as I was concerned, it was all or nothing. I didn't hear back from them. I'd failed miserably at the first attempt. I didn’t let the embarrassment stop me from ever going to another interview though. I had enough mental clarity to see it as a learning experience. I regrouped & came back stronger. I concluded that I had to get rid of the idea that I needed to smash every interview. It's a numbers game & there's plenty of jobs out there. I instead needed to view every interview as practice.
"If I don't get this job, I can always apply for another one. & I’ll use my experience from this one to make me better prepared for the next one"
"Even if I go to 100 interviews without getting a job, as long as I keep trying, I haven't failed.
These thoughts took the pressure off. I was able to relax & just be myself in the following interviews, instead of the nervous sweaty wreck that represented me in my first one. This was a turning point in my life with regards to my fear of failure. It allowed me to see failure as a friend you embrace. A friend that helps you unlock the cheat code to success, not an enemy you avoid at all costs.
FAILURE IS NECESSARY
Through that experience, I learned that failure is a necessity. If you want to achieve anything in life you need to get comfortable with failing. To the point where you actually seek it. Failure is where all the lessons are hiding. When you go to the gym or are doing any sort of physical exercise, you're doing this exact thing. Seeking failure. That’s how your muscles adapt & grow to meet the new challenges & stresses you're exerting on them. High achievers who go through their whole lives without ever failing or struggling, do not exist. & if they did then they would have spent their whole life not learning anything meaningful.
Successful people are essentially successful failures. They've failed at so many things to get to where they're now. They've failed way more than they've succeeded. You just don't hear about it. It's not glamorous to talk about your failures, so the focus is on what has gone right rather than what went wrong. In reality, failures teach us how to succeed. All you need to do is extract the lessons from them that you need to get you to the next phase of your success.
Bill Gates, you may know him for trying in vain to warn us about coronavirus years before it eventually happened. He has amassed a ridiculous net worth of around $80 billion & is universally known as a computing software god. Well, maybe not a god but he knows a lot about computers. However, he didn't know enough to make a success of his first software company called Traf-O-Data, which analysed raw traffic logs. In Hindsight & in my worthless opinion on all things tech, that never seemed like it would have been a winner. Traf-O-Data doesn't really roll off the tongue, does it? Even so, he would've learned vital lessons from that experience. Lessons which lead him to make Microsoft, & as people who are too lazy to finish well-known stories say... the rest is history.
Katy Perry is a wildly-successful singer & songwriter. You may know her from songs about feeling like plastic bags blowing in the wind & kissing girls. You may not know that she had a long journey filled with consecutive failures before she reached stardom. Her first album completely flopped, only selling 200 copies before the record label went out of business. She was then subsequently dropped from 2 other labels. It took her nearly 10 years of failure & hard work before she released the critically-acclaimed hit song, I Kissed a Girl, in 2008. The bigger your goals, the more failure you will come across. She trusted the process of failure, not giving up for 10 years & reaped the benefits of it.
Thomas Edison who you may know for having an unusually large head is by far one of the most famous inventors in history. He holds thousands of patents to his name. However, when attempting to invent a commercially-viable electric lightbulb, he failed over 10,000 times. When asked by a reporter how it felt to fail so many times, he merely stated, “I have not failed 10,000 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
PERSPECTIVE IS EVERYTHING
It's all about perspective. You can either see failure as something that is working for you or against you. All the failures mentioned in this blog, me included, view failure as something that serves us. With each occurrence bringing us closer to our goals. This mentality can be adopted by anyone. I implore anyone reading this to fail. Fail spectacularly, fail often & you will in turn fail towards your goals.