Everyone wants to succeed. Why would anyone want to fail? Here I am, challenging this thought.
Creating a New Year Resolution list carries pressure for many people. What if you publish it but can't fulfill it? It would be so embarrassing if everyone knew I didn't make it. To avoid failure, many just don't do New Year Resolutions anymore.
Indeed, failure is a frightening thing. But is our fear of failure unchangeable?
How can we control and change our definition and feelings towards failure for ourselves?
Failure is a fact, but it's the emotion it triggers we dread. Avoiding an attempt that could fail, often means avoiding the emotional impact, not the failure itself.
Making getting NOs your goal
You might have heard that you need to get enough NOs to get a YES. Let's tweak this mindset even more: If we always hope that maybe this time it'll be a YES, we'll still be perfectionists and procrastinators. Let's just make getting NOs our goal. Let's truly free ourselves from the fear of getting a NO.
Have you watched a high jump competition? What's interesting about this sport is that everyone's game ends in failure. When an athlete successfully jumps over, they raise the bar a little higher, then a little higher, until they fail multiple times. Even world champions are no exception. If you look at the growth of an athlete, you see a sequence of failures. In my mind, this is the journey that mirrors life – not so much a marathon, but rather akin to high jumping. Why aren't they afraid of failure? Because they have redefined the meaning of failure for themselves. For them, failure has transformed from something to avoid into something to pursue. More interestingly, it's their repeated failures that allow them to improve and succeed. Maybe, it applies to us too -- if we have always been successful, it might mean we are not reaching our full potential.
Have you heard of Ramit Sethi? He has a Netflix show called "How to Get Rich", and is also an author of a book and a YouTube channel. It was from him that I picked up this intriguing concept: aim for five failures every month. He said, if I cannot fail at least five times, then I am not giving it all. Interesting, right? When you embrace this mindset, you generate a more positive emotion when you fail: Ha! I've already failed twice this month, three more to go to meet my goal! Feels different, doesn't it?
Let's fail more in 2024, and love ourselves more because we are so brave
For 2024, let go of your conventional success resolutions. Draft a New Year's Failure Resolution instead.
You might still feel embarrassed about failing, but you can start by reducing the importance of success or failure in one thing, and separate what you do from your identity. We think too much because we think everything we do is part of our identity, which makes us hard to act and easy to give up when faced with setbacks.
We all know that if we criticize someone, we need to criticize the action, not the person. But we rarely offer ourselves such leniency. Because we think our success shows our intelligence, we also feel our failures show that we don't deserve the love or wealth.
Let's show more kindness to ourselves in the new year. Why can't we think, "if I fail, I'll sit down ad love my bravery, praise my persistence in learning"? So many people are terrified and decide to do nothing, but you, despite your fear, have taken that step.
2024 is here now, what's your next failure? How do you want to love that brave, failure-embracing YOU?
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