If you're human (if not, a sincere thanks for choosing this blog as part of your foray into the human experience), you've failed. And lots. You've failed so many times that you fail to remember how many times you've failed.
Part of the reason you don't remember it is that you did a lot of this failing when you were small. Every time you tried to do anything as a small child, you failed the first 5, 10, 20, 100 times. If you've ever watched a toddler learn to walk, you know exactly what this looks like. Through the miracle of learning, this small child, who isn't even able to really communicate yet, works through an elaborate dance of incremental, short-term goals to reach the long-term objective.
First, it's pulling up on something to try to stand up. Then it's bouncing up and down in place and shifting weight back and forth in what is best described as a cross between a hip-hop dance move and an epileptic fit. Then it's scooting along sideways while holding on to something. And finally, haltingly, the first cautious steps. Thank goodness for diapers for many reasons, but the additional padding for all of the inevitable falling down is very helpful. Each time the toddler falls, he or she gets smarter and stronger and just that much closer to understanding how to get up. He or she is failing better each and every time.
Failure is, in fact, the only way to learn to walk and talk and eat and draw and do all the other things that we do early on in life. As we watch children go through this, we understand this implicitly and we accept their failures openly. But somehow, we seem to forget that this rule of learning applies to us too, and we often beat ourselves up about all of the skills we can't grasp instantly. It's as if, without the diaper, we've lost our confidence. And too often, this frustration leads to us giving up prematurely. So perhaps we all need to take a lesson from the toddlers and remember that while frustrating and potentially embarrassing, most failures are not as bad as they seem at the time, and ultimately, if we reflect, change strategies, or try harder, we too can learn to fail better.
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