Failure. A painful word. Something we try desperately to avoid. A potentiality that accompanies all great risks and all great successes. There is something to be envied in those who do not fear failure. There is something great about those who fear nothing and proceed with great ideas regardless of the risk ahead. I often think that it is this fearlessness that leads to success. My greatest successes came from situations where I didn’t gauge the risk at all, or gauged it incorrectly. Sometimes I simply didn’t care. I was motivated by something far greater than failure could ever threaten. I was passionate about each of these projects in ways I am not about normal things (let’s say, eating lunch, because I often forget). At any rate, embracing failure can be a powerful tool when working towards a goal (be it a project, paper, or something else entirely).
It should come as no surprise, then, that I’m going to ask you to fail. If you’re struggling with a huge paper you have due at the end of the month: go ahead and write an “F” paper. If you’ve got a huge presentation coming up but you just can’t start: do a terrible presentation using only white paper and a single yellow crayon. Go ahead and be bad. Embrace the fact that it won’t be perfect. Focus on something other than the task at hand to tangentially make yourself work on the thing you’re probably trying to avoid. Work is hard. Starting work can be even harder. Just embrace failure and do something. Oftentimes you’ll get through that first terrible draft, look at what you’ve got, and know exactly how to fix it (read: actually do it well). Sometimes you just have to fail first. I speak from experience: failure is an option.