No matter how developed and sophisticated you are, no matter what you have already achieved, at some point in your life you have experience some sort of fear of failure. While it is normal to have it at some point it is not necessary nor helpful.
As Benjamin Franklin liked to say: “Momentary failure is not permanent defeat”. And this is exactly the problem. We tend to see momentary failure as permanent defeat.
In our contemporary culture we are used to look magazines covers with reality Tv performers smiling on them or with the 20 something internet millionaire or the 20 something pop start and we believe that, that is it. Not only we believe in overnight success but we think that is the norm and we compare ourselves to others.
So we look for magic beans, easy solutions in our pill society. We condition ourselves to fear failure because if we fail, we are losers and our lives are over…
If you are going to do something meaningful with the time you have on earth, you need to have long term thinking. The expression goes: “ People over estimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in 5”.
Anything worth doing takes time and dedication.
To chase your dream and reach your full potential is a enormous task, and you can be sure that you will have momentary failure. What you need to do is find that one occupation that you are willing to fail several times and still have total dedication and motivation for it.
If you study the lives of extremely successful and creative people you will see that they all failed numerous times.
Thomas Edison had tried 1000 times to create a light bulb before actually succeeding in making one . When asked how he felt about having failed so many times, his reply was: I did not failed, I found 999 ways how not to make light bulbs, I only needed one way to make it work. And yes… you guessed how the story ends…. we have light bulbs now.
Ford had caused a factory to close, nobody wanted to work with him and almost did not found the funds to set up shop. Mozart almost stayed in his home town working for a third grade orchestra. And the list goes on and on…
Failure is actually good, if you fail it means you put in the time and energy into something. It means you tried. It is like being wrong, some people have a problem admitting they are wrong, but in doing so you are growing, you are learning and opening your mind for new ideas and possibilities.
The only thing to fear is inaction, that in turn is created by fear of failure.
As always, thank you for reading.
Photos (except Logo) from Pixabay.com