The Art of Failure

I hate being new to things because everyone just assumes you don't know anything at all. They try to hold your hand and baby you. Maybe they don't, maybe they're kind of jerky because this assumption and compared to you they know everything. It sucks that a lot of people won't just let you fail on your own. That's my philosophy but most people around me do not share the same idea.

I feel like allowing someone to fail allows them to learn a more valuable lesson and it allows them to learn a lot quicker than this hand-holding method. It's ridiculous that were turned into this kind of coddling society. Where everyone is afraid to fail. They're so afraid to fail that they do stupid things. They make us who are new at a job or in a class feel stupid and inferior. I don't need you to hold my hand. I need you to tell me what to do and then let me do it. If I fail I fail and I learn something from it and I know not to do the same thing again. by allowing someone to fail it allows them to get over the fear of failure. ( although some people need to fail multiple times in order to grasp this concept.)

I feel like this really need some examples and I think you might know where I'm going with this. Thomas Edison failed and hundreds of times before he could invent the light bulb. Scientists and engineers fail all the time before they can get their experiments vaccines or machines correct. I guess we need to stop thinking of failure in negative terms. Instead of thinking of failure as something that you can't come back from I think we should look at it as an obstacle in the way of success. In the same way that gamers die a million times playing a video game before they can complete or defeat the game we should think of failure as an excuse to try again but with a different approach.

Oddly enough this revelation came at the perfect time in my life. The stress of today's economy trying to find the right job in it, and trying to sell a book and it has made me a little jaded and cynical. I mean I'd like to call myself a realist but in actuality I was kind of thinking and failure in the wrong terms. Which means it's time to get off my ass and do what I love to do. (And allow myself to be tortured by my current job 39 hours a week.)

So, like I alluded to earlier it's not worth it to fail if you don't learn anything. It's also not worth it to fail if you aren't taking any risks to begin with. So, do what you want to do and when you fail make sure you learn from it. Failure is an inevitable part of life we just need to stop looking at it in such a negative way.