Fearless Failure: Does it really exist?
Let me tell you my biggest fear. If someone asked me a couple of years ago, I would tell him darkness. I hate being in the dark till now. I am sure we all have fears, it’s quite normal. But we all have one fear in common, the fear of failure.
It’s easy to imagine failure, we think about it all the time.
Can you imagine success? Can you imagine that you have all the things you want in your life? Did that success you imagined feel real, like something achievable?
Probably not.
You think that your dreams are impossible because of the way our mind works when it comes to success and failure. When we are thinking about something our brain tends to think 90% of the time about the failures, making a million what-if questions of worst-case scenarios.
Fear of Failure creates discomfort
The mind doesn’t like being out of its comfort zone. And this is a taught mindset. When we were kids we learned every day something new. We explored all the world around us and learned through trial and error. You have to crawl before you walk. You have to walk before you run. You are walking now because giving up never crossed your mind. So fear of failure probably is something we learn later in life. Maybe they taught you that it’s embarrassing or even painful to fail and one failure can stigmatize you for your entire life.
That’s not true.
Life is more like a “Super Mario” game
In case of running out of lives you can start over, having also the benefit of knowing what went wrong and which were the actual moves that lead you to this result. There is never a game over. A new game batch will always exist and give you a second chance to restart and get improved with your moves.
“YES, I made a mistake”
But in order for failure to be really meaningful and worth of happening we have to admit its existence not only to the people around us but most importantly to ourselves.
How can I find the “why” it happened, what I could personally have done better and get improved, if at first I don’t realize my mistakes?
Of course, nobody said that this is the easy way. This failure can turn you down emotionally, embarrass you socially and affect your self-image but this makes you nothing else than a human. A responsible creature with its ups and downs that at the last minute puts its ego aside and tries to help others and itself in order to achieve the most ambitious goals.
And this is the time when “growth” takes over.
Success is coming out of a bunch of failures
We have to get rid of the mindset that success is self-made. No one woke up one morning and knew the exact steps to reach success, achieve wealth and popularity. Imagine success as the destination of a journey full of obstacles and rocks, that will exhaust you and make your legs bleed but in the end, you will realize that it was 100% worth it. Not because of the beauty and pleasantness that the destination provides you but because you had the power to overcome all these difficulties.
“It is unimaginable to me that we prefer not to lose what we already have rather than not win something that we don’t have”
Why don’t you try something new today?
Cowriter : Christina Giaramani
