Oops, I did it again
I’ve been thinking a lot about Four Letter Words, recently. Four Letter Words are typically bad, but:
Goal is a four letter word.
Want is a four letter word.
Fail is a four letter word.
[There are a lot of other words that we think of as “four letter words” that actually have… more than four letters. I know, right? Shocking.]
“I WANT to reach this GOAL, and if I don't reach it, then I've FAILed.”
Yikes. How often has that been part of your internal soundtrack? How often have you tried to reach a goal through a specific, rigid, prescribed route only to have it let you down? Is there a specific let-down that pops into your head? Do you feel it in a particular place in your body?
Don’t get stuck there, and don’t salt that wound. Check in. Observe. Get the hell out.
Remember, you’re conditioned to believe that failure is something to be afraid of, to stay away from, because it’s bad.
But if you want to innovate, if you want to disrupt the way things have always been done, and if you want to supercharge your life, you have to get over failure-as-bad real quick; to instead think of failure as a series of iterations to get closer to "right". Within those iterations and re-dos, you can slowly embrace being flexible with yourself or giving yourself permission to pivot when you have an experience that takes you in a different direction.
You're not failing because you've decided to focus in some other way on some other thing.
When you think about goals or what you want or don’t want for yourself, things can get tricky. Thinking What if I'm not successful? What if I don't get what I want? keeps you from actually getting started, or it keeps you from taking big swings or thoughtful risks because you're worried about the consequences.
When you really start to act on what's a priority for you, what's aligned to your values, what you want that is uniquely and dynamically for yourself, and then if you “fail”? Well, now you have data, now you have experience, now you have done a thing, and now you can reshape, you can pick yourself up and you can try something else or try again.
If you are stuck with “if I don't do it right then I’ve failed”, you're never going to grow and you're never going to unleash the things that would make you happy, that would bring new opportunities and new challenges, new prospects, new joy.
If we stop thinking about those four letter words as bad things and we actually welcome the spectacular possibility of failure, the combustion, the oops, we can instead focus on the happy accidents we cause.
Post It notes were a failure.
Band-aids were a failure.
Superglue. I don't actually know that superglue was a failure, but I'm sure somebody failed at something and thus we have superglue. Right?
These objects that you were using every day may not have been what people set out to make in the first place, but golly, they are now part of what we are using every day. And then when we are done using them in one way, they can be recycled into something else.
It’s the same thing with our wants and our goals.
“I tried it this way and it didn't work out. Now I'm going to try another way that's much more interesting. Maybe I'm a little bit left of center where I thought I would be, this is a much more invigorating life that I'm having now because I experimented.”
How do you handle the oops? How do you rebound? How do you bounce back? How do you pivot in a less linear, more creative way because your point of view about what it means to fail has changed?
The next time you find yourself in a moment when things didn’t go according to how you thought it might, embrace the failure, and ask yourself
What happened?
So what?
What now?
And then, fuck it. Try again.
