You need to fail before you can really succeed, as success without failure is just good luck.
When we want to learn a new skill, we start by failing at it. Miserably in fact. When you first pick up a violin or a flute, you are going to sound terrible playing it. When you learn a new language, you start by completing garbling the syntax, the words, even the sounds of the letters themselves. Your frisbees whiz nowhere near where you want them to go. Your figure drawing looks barely better than a stick figure. You'll get five or ten minutes into jogging before you keel over from exhaustion.
In short, the first step to succeeding is to be spectacularly unsuccessful at what you want to do.
This is, of course, the point where many, many people just hang their hat and say they're done. We have such a strong social stigma against failure that we see failing at something as a sign that "we should not be doing this". As though success will simply be handed to you on a silver platter when you are supposed to have it.
And it's very easy to convince ourselves of this being the way things ought to be. Afterall, if you look around at people who are successful, they're not failing. That amazing artist you admire produces so many beautiful pieces of art. The concert musicians play stunningly complex music flawlessly in front of hundreds or thousands of people. These people are being wildly successful, so how can failure play any part in their success?
Because they already did their failing in the past. They were busy failing quietly while no one was watching and now they are succeeding while everyone's eyes are on them. Of course back then it was the present. They had to face their doubt, their fears, and the fact that they were failing at what they were doing, day after day. But in spite of that, they kept failing time and time again, day in and day out, working towards 10,000 Hours of failure so that they could finally start succeeding.
Of course, not all of the failure looked the same. First you would have stick figure drawings which were total failures. Then as they started to get rough shapes right, they would be failing at proportions. Then they would fail at shading or coloring things properly. Next they would fail at drawing difficult poses, or fail to capture complex textures. Each time they fail by progressively smaller and smaller amounts, and their failures would start to look more and more like success.
This is where the second, critical pitfall comes in - the moment where these people are failing by a small enough amount that some people can start appreciating their work. After so many disappointing failure, their efforts are starting to be recognized. So they stop. They have learned to do it "good enough". They have reached a mediocre level at this task and have laid down their burden, accepting that this is "as good as I'll get."
The masters-to-be, however, see that they are still failing. The failings are small, almost invisible to the less trained people, but they still register subconsciously. The people who will go on to become great SEE that there is still failure in their work and they decide to keep failing, harder than ever before. They come up with new, more extreme ways to push their limits, to force those imperfections into the light. Only when finally the failings have been reduced to a level that the master can no longer detect them will there be peace.
The Education system is where a lot of us spend twelve years (or more) of our time learning about success and failure. During these critical years we develop our understanding of the role that success and failure play in our lives, how to deal with them, and what they mean to us. We stigmatize the kids who do poorly ("the dumb ones") and praise the kids who do well ("the smart ones"). The kids who are doing well are succeeding, while the ones who are doing poorly are failing.
In actuality, both groups are failing, they are just failing differently. The "smart kids" are the ones who are failing quietly at home or in study groups. They're failing when they study flash cards, or create mini-tests, or make multiple drafts of essays. They fail when they ask a friend to edit their work, or when they challenge each other with questions. By contrast, the "dumb kids" aren't taking the time to fail up front. So when it comes time to hand in their homework or take a test, they fail where it counts instead of in the safer environment where it doesn't count.
If, by chance, you end up like I did in school where you are able to reach a mediocre level without failing, watch out. The level of success keeps going up and you haven't taken the time to develop the skills to embrace failure in private. Eventually you lose ground against the tide of failures because you haven't learned how to manage them. They're going to catch up to you eventually and in the worst possible way.
This failure-based-learning doesn't just apply to the skills you learn in school. It also applies to the social skills necessary to make friends, to manage a romantic relationship, to land a good job, and to ask for what you need. Yeah, those were all hard lessons to learn.
So if you want to learn anything, start by embracing the failures as much as possible. Because they're not going to go away. Of course, you only have so many hours in a lifetime in which to fail, so it's best to start as early as possible and pick the things you'd like to get better at the most so you can start failing at them as quickly as possible.
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