New Perspective on Failure
A new perspective on getting past failure
I’ve struggled with a fear of failure for a very long time, but I’ve also learned to be a lot more loving and forgiving of myself in life. Realistically, being that hard on yourself is just making things worse for you in the long run. Sometimes there’s things that are a bit unavoidable, and truth be told it sucks when you get it wrong, but don’t take it personally. Note it that you found a mistake, or you done something wrong, and just learn from it.
We’re gonna use an analogy here, and it’s something similar to Bruce Lee and his water mentality. I’m not saying I’m Bruce Lee, but I felt this was an aha moment like his.
I was driving to my parent’s house the other day. I have driven this road a good load of times now since moving, so I can safely say I remember the majority of the road. There’s bits of the road where I know there will be a pothole or a bump, and I’ll avoid it. The other day, there was a brand new pothole and I ran over it.
It didn’t annoy me, but I was thinking - my brain usually wouldn’t hold back on being angry about running over a pothole, what was different about this time?
Because it was a new pothole on a road. I’m not psychic. I know nothing about that pothole in advanced.
That then got me thinking a bit more: what if I was to give you a map, and within that map I noted - as best as I can - where those potholes were going to be? Then on the off chance, I missed out on one of these potholes, or a new pothole came? Would you be angry then? Would you think the whole journey is a waste and you have to start over? Would you give a fuck that much about it?
I wouldn’t really care too much about driving down a road and hitting a pothole. I wouldn’t get that angry really if I was driving down the road, and had as much information as possible, but still hit a pothole… so how is this different than failing?
The potholes are the failures, the road is the journey. You ran over one pothole, it’s not the end of the journey. You’ll run over many potholes, and there will be many new ones along the way.
Think of it this way - in software development, You got your Python code, with 95% (are you fucking kidding me?) code coverage unit tests, full integration suite/behaviour tests, all dependencies up to date, and it’s running on a shiny new Ubuntu EC2 instance. That’s your road with all known potholes already mapped out. In about a month’s time, I guarantee something new will pop up and you’ll have to maintain it or etc. Does that mean you were doomed from the start, and that you were coding failure to being with? FUCK NO.
It means that you are doing as much as you can to prevent failure, but nothing is fail proof. Everything has a weakness, and that’s the part you need to ingrain in you. There will be a moment that you have a weakness - notice that word (as it’s very important): WEAKNESS. Weaknesses can be addressed, and can always be improved. Try understanding that you are not a failure, you have some weaknesses that you need to work on.
The reason I’m writing this post: it’s advice that I need to take myself, and something that took me a while to get right. Once you have that in your mindset, you’ll quickly start to turn things around…
No more “I FAILED AT THIS”… instead “I’m weak at this, but I know I can get better“ or “I know what doesn’t work, let’s work on how to make it work”
You learn jack shit unless you fail in life, embrace the weaknesses you have, and make them into strengths.