Practice Failing and Succeed

For the past 9 years, I have managed to unwaveringly, stay in one place of work, and rendered my services (for the lack of a better phrase). It has become my second home. It’s comfortable, it’s familiar; it may not always be inviting but there’s something that gets me to wake up every morning and go there, even if remotely. Here’s why:

Someone once told me, “When you get too comfortable, look around. That might be you, stagnating!” I never truly understood what it meant until I found myself knee-deep in it. Comfort makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside, it also dissuades you from experiencing struggles and being challenged. The adrenaline rush that fills you up when you’re trying something new for the first time and the fear of failing. I noticed I wasn’t doing that enough.

Think of it like this, as a child you jumped into the pool without the fear of drowning, remember how liberating that felt… well for a few seconds. Until you dipped down further into the water with your own weight and didn’t magically float to the surface as people do in the movies. You then gasped for air, frantically moving your arms to pedal all the way up to the top. Embarrassed to this day, you have never returned to the pool or worse pretended to have asthma every time you were forced to enter one.

Well, luckily for you, you’re not a competitive swimmer. Neither am I! But take that same scenario and map it to your surroundings. Did you get into something headfirst, felt liberated; the feeling that lasted just a few days, and then the drowning began, you tried to rise back to the surface and upon first breath, you decided to give up? Well congratulations, like most people in this world, you have performed the loop once which in fact is meant to be infinite.

You failed but did not repeat. Let me explain.

Now in most parts of the world and some of it comes from generations of perfectionism passed down in families and communities. “Failing” is not something they talk about openly. Children are encouraged to hide their grades to avoid that one moment of embarrassment. Encouraged to hide what they’ve experienced and shaped it into something that in truth never really happened. “Gran, I got straight As…” The gran smiles and hugs you and says, “that’s just wonderful, you should be rewarded!”

The slightest hint of failure is disguised as a victory and rewarded with positive reinforcement. There are countless instances that happen every day in support of this. As children, we are told perfectionism is everything. Failure and its consequences are unheard of. And when the children grow up, they enter practical life and aren’t prepared to drown. That feeling is cold and alien. Their comfort is in success. Unfortunately, success is not easily found.

Enter work life. Where failure awaits you at the doorstep. There are workplace cultures that talk about helping you succeed. Companies that claim they can get you where you dream to be. When you sit in that interview, ask if and how many times have they failed in the past. What’s their tolerance to failure? Failing doesn’t come cheap, it takes a lot of effort, energy, and persistence. This is why the lessons from a failed experiment are invaluable. Practice failing in order to succeed in the things you want to do. Repeat that loop:

Jump— Go Under— Breathe — Repeat

Jump: Head into every new experience without fear of failing. Feel liberated like a child. Ready to learn what life has to offer.

Go Under: Let the water (“problem”) take you, wait to see if you float or sink down deeper. Find that energy to swim back up.

Breathe: Come to the surface, collect the data from your failed experiment, analyze what went wrong, and jot down your key takeaways.

Repeat: Remember to jump back in. This is important. Fight the feeling of failure or judgment.

When you do this enough times, you not only possess mountains of knowledge and experience but you might just succeed at whatever you set your mind to do.

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