failure is inevitable.
I was quite interested in the whole ‘Tweet your 16 year old self’ hashtag that was on Twitter a few days ago, but I got caught up thinking about the idea that actually doing so would change the person I am today. When I don’t really like that idea, perhaps because I don’t like the idea that I might have achieved more, changed from the person I am – maybe I’d be ‘better’ or perhaps regardless of the faults that scratch away at me, I don’t want to be any different. Still, it made think for a while and that was where I ended up.
The other thing was this Oliver Burkeman column (in an interesting series called ‘This column will change your life‘) entitled ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’ about failure. That “the rate at which the human brain can evolve new faculties is millions of years slower than the rate at which humans generate change and produce new information.” So that even mundane things represent a complexity our brains are struggling to cope with so they feel horrible dispiriting – there are often more wrong solutions then right ones.
Instead, the only sensible thing isn’t to pick one solution but instead to try all of them. To stop thinking that ‘failure isn’t an option’ but instead to think that ‘failure is inevitable’ but to keep trying anyway.
I like this. For me, I get caught up, stopped by the idea that I can’t fail. So instead do nothing, not trying one solution or the other. It seems to make sense, more sense to me to just try and see what happens. To see failure not as an opportunity to give up but simply as motivation to try another way.
November 7, 2010