A Tremendously Common Mis-Conception About Life
Human beings hate to fail, fall or flail.
They want things to come easy, even when it’s the very first time they’ve ever done it, and actually DEMAND to be so cool, and smart, and capable that they can do it amazingly well on the very first try.
There could be many reasons for this. It may be innate, or trained into us by our schooling system where mistakes are stressed, highlighted in red and are used to evaluate whether we’re “good enough” or “NOT good enough.”
The thing is, that’s not how real life works. Human beings are not like other animals who totally rely on instincts they’re born with to live their lives.
A new-born animal takes a few minutes to start walking, a human being takes months. A new animal can “talk” almost right away, a human being takes years to do so. There isn’t anybody who is born with a math degree.
A big part of humanity is that you have to train to acquire a talent or a skill. And a big component of training is to make mistakes and fail during the training so you don’t do it when it’s time to perform.
However, we get our ego twisted into this, and demand to be amazing on the very first training we do, otherwise more often than not we give up after a few tries and move on.
The image above of the red globular thing is an image of the Bodhidharma doll.
Bodhidharma is the founder of the Shao-Lin temple and the “inventor” of Kung Fu. And his basic philosophy was simple: no matter how many times you fall, stand up and try again.
Fallen 10 times? Stand up and try for the 11th. Fallen 70 times? Stand up 71 times.
Just keep on trying.
No human being is born with excellence in every conceivable skill. So don’t expert yourself to be super-human.
Realize your humanity, work with it, make the most of it…
And most importantly, try, try again.
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