Fail Harder

What is your biggest fear?

In preparation for our end-of-season tournament that is this week, my coach asked exactly that.

Could it be ablutophobia? Or how about nomophobia, or maybe even pogonophobia?

No, but actually. What are you really afraid of?

Personally, I fear failure. When I said this, my coach confidently replied, “You will make a bad play.” However, she also pointed out that it is more important to react well to your mistakes, because they are an inevitability. So why fear that if you already know that those mistakes will happen?

Recently, I watched a video that said, “Show me a player who doesn’t make mistakes and I will show you a player who is not getting better.” For some reason, this resonated with me. Admittedly, I am a person who has probably missed opportunities to score, or succeed in general, because I was more afraid of screwing up. When you fear failure, you begin to lose the capacity to to succeed. If you really think about it, the fear of failure makes you “stuck” because even though you aren’t moving backwards, you certainly aren’t moving forwards. Without taking risks, you will never challenge yourself. When you don’t challenge yourself, you cannot grow. Without growth, you cannot succeed.

“Some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you’ve lived so cautiously that you might not have lived at all. In which case, you’ve failed by default”

— J.k. Rowling

Essentially, by fearing failure, we passively limit ourselves. Not only that, but I am beginning to believe that the first step to success is failure. So, what I propose is that rather than fearing failure, fail and then try again. Fail again, but fail better.

Even, possibly, fail harder. Because the harder you fail, the harder you are trying and the more risks you will be taking, and the greater the reward will be when you do finally succeed.