When did ‘being a success’ become the point of living?
Children are told they go to school to learn, but quickly find out that what they need to do is to obtain a certain grade in specific subjects that someone decided were the most important ones. They are taught to work hard to avoid failing. If they do fail within the school system, this can greatly influence what they feel capable of doing with their lives.
Failure is a charged word in our culture. We all experience it at some point and most of us try to avoid it any cost. Maybe this isn’t surprising - failure has serious practical consequences at times. But the truth is that not every new activity or idea we embark on will cost us an arm and a limb if we don’t succeed. Yet we are afraid of even the possibility of a relatively insignificant failure.
When we fail at something, most of us feel a distinct heaviness in the pit of our stomach telling us that things haven’t gone the way we wanted them to. Instead of trying to run away from feeling, we can learn to view it as something that happens naturally when we’re on a new venture. It’s funny how often people who end up being successful are the ones who are willing to fail, because they don’t see failure as the end of the road. They can see it as one more step on their journey, or as re-direction onto a different path, or simply as part of being human.
In her warm-hearted and inspiring book, ‘Big Magic’, Elizabeth Gilbert writes about a quote from the author Clive James, who discovered that: “Failure has a function. It asks you if you want to go on making things”. What if we completely reversed what happens at school and took on projects even if we knew we might fail at them? What if our decision to take on something new was not based on whether or not we are likely to succeed at it, but on whether we might enjoy it or learn something useful and interesting from it?
What if we failed, and went on making things and making things happen?
Our lives might look quite different if we did.
Children are told they go to school to learn, but quickly find out that what they need to do is to obtain a certain grade in specific subjects that someone decided were the most important ones. They are taught to work hard to avoid failing. If they do fail within the school system, this can greatly influence what they feel capable of doing with their lives.
Failure is a charged word in our culture. We all experience it at some point and most of us try to avoid it any cost. Maybe this isn’t surprising - failure has serious practical consequences at times. But the truth is that not every new activity or idea we embark on will cost us an arm and a limb if we don’t succeed. Yet we are afraid of even the possibility of a relatively insignificant failure.
When we fail at something, most of us feel a distinct heaviness in the pit of our stomach telling us that things haven’t gone the way we wanted them to. Instead of trying to run away from feeling, we can learn to view it as something that happens naturally when we’re on a new venture. It’s funny how often people who end up being successful are the ones who are willing to fail, because they don’t see failure as the end of the road. They can see it as one more step on their journey, or as re-direction onto a different path, or simply as part of being human.
In her warm-hearted and inspiring book, ‘Big Magic’, Elizabeth Gilbert writes about a quote from the author Clive James, who discovered that: “Failure has a function. It asks you if you want to go on making things”. What if we completely reversed what happens at school and took on projects even if we knew we might fail at them? What if our decision to take on something new was not based on whether or not we are likely to succeed at it, but on whether we might enjoy it or learn something useful and interesting from it?
What if we failed, and went on making things and making things happen?
Our lives might look quite different if we did.