If you can make 1000 failed telesales calls, chances are if you genuinely tried to succeed, and failed that many times, you’ll have learnt a tremendous amount more than if you fixated on the successes you were after, and ultimately, stopped trying, because you thought you didn’t have the right skill or competence.  Naivete, and comfort in being able to fail, are so important in allowing us to be able to develop and grow in terms of our skills and competence, just look at a baby learning to walk. The only reason a child can learn to walk, is because they’ve failed every time, but keep trying.  The only difference between how quickly one child learns and another, is the number of times they try, in a given time frame, as learning to walk, on a physiological level requires the constant firing of neural synapses, down the muscle fibres, until myelin sheaths are formed, that allow an ‘unconscious’ competence to be developed.  That same process needs to occur for any skill, or competence development.

For me, I want to fail.  The more spectacularly I can fail, it means the more courageously I will have tried.  But more importantly, the more frequently I fail, the quicker I will learn what works and what doesn’t. Like the child learning to walk, constant feedback, through thousands of attempts will eventually lead to mastery, and competence.  But if I don’t set out to fail, and embrace the desire to fail, then I’ll never give myself the permission to fail in public, or openly or honestly.  In my mind, being honest with yourself and others, is as much about being transparent enough to acknowledge failure, as much as it is about failing itself.  It takes much more effort, and hard work to fail, publicly, and then to try again, than it does to try and succeed.  (Oftentimes, if you’re trying and succeeding, it means you have to try even harder, to get to a point of failure, before any new learning/feedback can occur in the process).

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, I’ll definitely be adding Steve Pressfield’s ‘Do The Work’ to my reading list.

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