Failure has a strange power. It can provide the most effective lessons in life. And yet it’s also a source of fear, anxiety, stress, and a reason many choose not to try.
How is it that some people can launch new ideas, new ventures, new strategies, new hobbies, and new friendships without fear of failure?
I think they’ve realized it’s all an experiment.
Experiments are there for us to test a hypothesis. See what works and what doesn’t. See what’s provable. Experiments are ways for us to demonstrate, first to ourselves, that this new idea can actually work.
What if it doesn’t work. What if it fails?
That’s just it. Experiments are, by their very nature, free from failure. The experiment that “fails” merely proves or disproves an idea. The experiment itself is a success either way.
The continuous journey to explore and experiment leads to the opposite of failure. The outcome of each experiment is merely another observation in a long series of experiments.
When a person’s sense of self-worth and self-esteem are wrapped around the execution of something new, the experiment’s natural flow can be compromised. The experiment can’t function properly since the “owner” is working so hard to tilt the results away from his definition of failure.
The true experimenter gets to explore without fear of failure.
In fact, the failures pave the way to new successes.
Photo Credit: Unsplash–SpaceX