Skip to content

Prepare to Fail

By Micah Redding
January 30, 2009
Failure is an option

Failure is an option

Seth Godin has written a great post about the resolutions people don’t admit - even to themselves.

While they’re resolving to create new things, save the world, and rescue small villages from poverty, they’re also making resolutions in secret:

“Don’t look stupid!”
“Don’t say the wrong thing!”
“Don’t screw up!”
“Don’t fail!”

The problem is, these resolutions are really easy to keep. Just never attempt anything great. Don’t speak up, don’t raise your hand, don’t try something different, don’t start anything new.

The world is full of people keeping these resolutions, keeping their heads down, trying not to get noticed. The less noticed they are, the less likely they’ll be called on to do something ambitious - and then they’ll never have to fear making a fool of themselves in front of their peers.

But these resolutions can sabotage even the most ambitious person. Maybe you’re in the middle of planning a great event, and you have a crazy new idea. You choke it down because someone else might shoot it down. Maybe you’re trying to organize something, but are afraid to tell your friends about it. Maybe when you do tell them, you downplay it, so that it won’t look like it’s that important to you. You’re afraid that if you sound excited about it, and they reject it, you’ll look stupid.

These things constantly keep us from reaching our potential, always undermining our greatest endeavors. If you can’t throw yourself fully into something, you will never do anything great.

You will be precisely average.

There is only one way to move beyond this: to be unafraid of failure. Seth Godin makes it his GOAL to fail. Make it a goal to start 3 projects that will fail, ask 3 stupid questions, or come up with an idea others are going to think is ridiculous. Only then will you succeed when one of those turns out to be not-so-stupid after all.

Only by doing that can you get through to the things that will be amazing.

Posted in Fomenting The Resolution.

3 Responses

Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. Blake Palmer said
    on January 30, 2009

    Awesome.

  2. william smith said
    on January 30, 2009

    i am waiting to see if i have managed to fail. i proposed to cast a several ton, 10′ concrete mobius strip for the peace arch park on the u. s./canada border. i have no experience casting concrete, so if the proposal doesn’t fail i will be learning a new skill for the april installation. ;)

  3. Heather Cobb said
    on February 2, 2009

    I loved this idea! I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the last few days because being afraid of failure is a big problem for me. The coolest thing happened yesterday. I was visiting a friend in Gordonsville, TN and the preacher at church spoke on this same topic! So now I’m REALLY thinking this is something I need to work on. :)

Some HTML is OK

(required)

(required, but never shared)

or, reply to this post via trackback.