The Fear of Failure

Failure is a challenging subject to talk about. Some have a natural tendency to surf on its ups and down, while others look at it with suspicion. 

One of the most crucial ideas Seth Godin likes to talk about is fear of failure. In one of the interviews I watched of him, here is what I found fascinating;

“Ridiculous is the new remarkable. Before something works, everybody says it’s ridiculous. The cost of being wrong is tiny. In 1957 when Ford Motor company launched the Edsel, they lost a $1 bn. Today, if you’re wrong about a blog post, tomorrow comes and it’s over. Today if you’re wrong about a web app, it did not take that long to build it and get it into the world, compared to the cost of when I was in the software business in 1985, where it took eleven months to build a software on 4 floppy disks with 20 people working on it. So all the failures are getting cheaper and cheaper.”

So it looks like allowing yourself to fail is the real path to success.

Seth concluded by saying:

“The only thing that’s holding us back, is not the cost of failing, it’s thinking about failing.” 

It reminded me that a baby who learns walking makes thousands of attempts before finally walking.  What would have happened if as a baby, we all decided to stop trying to walk at our first attempt to stand on our feet.  

Like little babies, we need to relearn about the beauty of trying over and over again, and stop thinking that it has to be perfect from the very first attempt.

This different perspective shows us how failure can be seen as a perfection, the perfection of failure. In other words, your lack of failure reveals your lack of trying. But the real failure is to fail to learn from failure. That's what makes it a perfection.

Which brings me to the next topic. Master Yoda’s “Do or do not, there is no try” is a reminder that everything we do must be done with the deepest intention to succeed. With that thought firmly established in our mind, any setback ends up being crucial milestones towards a goal that gains in clarity and definition. It's like the autofocus of a camera, constantly adjusting and readjusting itself every fraction of a second until it finds the perfect image. That's how failure works as a perfection towards success. It's the autofocus of your mind to help you gain clarity and focus toward your true goal.  

If we hold failure as an outcome to be avoided at all cost and if we look at it with fear, chances are that we will never learn anything in life.  Most of the progress we all made in our existence always came from the though failures and stumbles that we all encountered. 

Like a baby trying to learn walking, we will stumble and fall again and again, until we finally get it right.  But without our willingness to fail and feel the pain of failure, nothing can happen.  

That fear of failure can indeed keep us stuck.

Stumble is defined as follows in the dictionary: “trip or momentarily lose one's balance; almost fall.”

It’s that unstable moment where you are on the edge almost about to fall.  But this is also the place where you learn the most. The fact is that some of the most successful artists, business entrepreneurs and creators all had their moments where they stumbled, and even fell on their face.

The drive to keep trying over and over again comes from an overwhelming desire to achieve something that motivates you from deep within. Without that deeper purpose that Walt Disney or Ludwig van Beethoven kept connected to, none of their achievements would have taken place.   

In other words, it’s as if they knew before they even knew. There was a powerful sense of connection to and understanding of what it was they wanted to create, and why they were doing it. The motivation to keep trying over and over again came from that burning desire to make it happen no matter what.

When you know why you are doing what you are doing, nothing can stop you. It can be a Mother’s desire to see her child flourish, an artist whose creative purpose is unstoppable, an entrepreneur whose ideas can change the world, or a writer whose stories are waiting to emerge at the surface of reality.

And you ? What is your burning desire that will push you trying and trying again until you actually do it ?

Ben Ghalmi travels the world to build bridges of understanding and connections. He is an Executive Coach with John Foley Inc. and advises business leaders and innovators who are eager to create peace around them and in the world. He founded YogiCEO, a platform of dialogue and social innovation. 

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