Failure Isn’t Permanent
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 | motivation
I’m trying to help a co-worker find a date. She had the wonderful idea of joining Match.com but got cold feet and chickened out before joining. I’ve been trying to motivate her for the past week to just take the plunge and join but she’s been putting up a lot of lame excuses. Her worst excuse is “what if I go on a date with somebody bad?”. It’s this kind of thinking that makes me want to hit her with a stick. You don’t stop because of one bad date - failure isn’t permanent.
This fallacy doesn’t just apply to romance. People are always chickening out of things because of the fear that something won’t work. They’re afraid to switch their college major or afraid to write a book or afraid to play sports because of the fear of doing something wrong. What’s wrong is that people assume that if their date is bad, or if their new major is hard or if their book flops or if they miss a basket that all of their work was wasted. This isn’t the truth. If your date was bad you find another date next week. If your book flops, re-write it or write another one. The idea here is that failure isn’t permanent, it’s only one stop along a journey. And that journey is going to have many successes and many failures too.
In fact, stories of failure are so common among people who eventually succeed that it really should be viewed as a prerequisite for success. If you haven’t failed at something in the past, you’re probably doing something wrong. I say “get out there and fail”! If you don’t, you can’t ever reach the successes further down the path.
A great example is the history of American moon missions. All we remember from popular culture is that President Kennedy announced in 1961 that we’d put a man on the moon and by 1969 we accomplished that. What nobody remembers is that the first 15 American moon missions (starting with unmanned missions in 1958) were failures. 15 failed missions in a row would be enough to make most people give up, but we kept plugging away at it. And these missions weren’t even glamorous - some just involved putting objects into orbit and a few involved deliberately crashing objects into the moon. The Ranger 6 mission’s objective was to crash a spacecraft into the moon and snap a few pictures before it impacted and even that mission failed. But these failures weren’t permanent - we kept working and we kept traveling down the path and it ended up with getting Americans on the moon in 1969 and bringing them back safely.
My co-worker may end up joining Match.com. She may go on a lot of bad dates and a few good ones. I don’t know what will happen to her if she joins, but I know what will happen if she doesn’t join - nothing at all.
2 Comments to Failure Isn’t Permanent
Just send her over here~~~
I think the thing is failure happens. And yea, not permanent. But it still sucks.
One other thing is, what did you ACTUALLY lose in your “failure”? Some time? Some money? Some $? Some embarrassment? Etc…
More important is to consider what you will gain if you succeed. More important is to realize what you will gain even if you fail.
Of course this is coming from a No-peep (as opposed to yes-man lol). Slowly trying to fix that about me….
ChopsMarch 12, 2009
Good point SJ - the losses from failure are nothing compared to the gains from success.
March 11, 2009