Great question.
And I don’t really have a good answer.
Okay, okay, there are the obvious ones (i.e. cure AIDs and cancer, end world hunger, eliminate poverty, etc. etc.), but really? I think of it more as a personal question. Like, if you knew that you couldn’t fail – if that unrealistic fear of failure that possesses almost all of man suddenly was lifted from your soul – what would you do? Would you learn how to dance? Would you write a novel?
It’s not so clean cut for me as curing illnesses and stopping worldwide epidemics. I have an obsession with failure, it seems. Why do we fear it like we do? I mean, really – if we were to embrace failure instead of running away from it, what could we accomplish? “I didn’t fail; I’ve just found 40,000 ways that don’t work.” Why don’t we think of our failures as a process of eliminations until we get the right answer?
I mean, I understand need for near-perfection in the business world. But in school, for instance – if a child fails to complete a project correctly, then the failure becomes a learning experience. If placed in the right circumstances, the kid learns the wrong way to do something (though whether he applies this knowledge or not is up to him). Instead, the child is scolded and punished for his failures. Is that why we associate failure with something bad? Because as children we are punished when we fail at something?
Instead of punishment, maybe we should encourage learning from failure. It certainly worked in other places – households that later became hotbeds of invention and creativity. Because, really, if you have no fear of failure, then you don’t need to be afraid to try. You don’t stop and question yourself – “What if I do it wrong?” – because you know that if you do it wrong, you’ll learn, move forward, and make something better on the next try.
Maybe I’m full of hot air. Who knows? What I think is that every time a kid fails, we should point out the things that caused the failure. “That’s not right – how could you fix that?” Maybe he’d learn something. Maybe he’d do it better. Maybe he’d get some self-esteem. Maybe he’d make something out of his failure that he could be proud of.
What would you do if you knew you could not fail?
Panda out.
If I knew I could not fail, I would take the MCAT. I would try salsa dancing. I would tell people what I really think more often. I wouldn’t hesitate to go into crazy debt for the grad program that I’m really interested in. I would flirt with men that I like. I fight my fear of failing every day, but I think that I am learning. Fear and guilt and anxiety plague my life like so many others, but not like they once did. I agree that failures should be viewed as learning experiences, but I think that it is even more important that we realize that things and people have value that is not conditional on accomplishments. I think that the little boy in your example will be most successful if he knows that he is valued regardless of those successes. I think that is what it is to know you cannot fail, to know that if you do you take something away from the experience that you can reference in the future and that your intrinsic value cannot be increased or diminished by failures or accomplishments then nothing is wasted, that these things serve to teach us about ourselves. Basically I think the point is that it is difficult to really try if you are too afraid of failing, so often pressuring people has the opposite of the effect intended. We can only get anywhere from starting where we’re at, so perhaps we should be more accepting of ourselves and others as we are today, instead of living in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction with everything, anticipating some future time when things will be like we think they should. I think most of us have had the experience of pursuing something determinedly and finding that it just isn’t what we expected, and maybe its the expectation that makes that happen and not any actual lacking. But I think that I have strayed from the original question…thanks for your thoughts.
L