Growing in Failure
by Christopher Nahumck, PhD, MDIV, MSW, MA
Ever tried.
Ever failed.
No matter.
Try again.
Fail again.
Fail better.
-Samuel Beckett
Sometimes, it’s hard to get the ball rolling. I’ve sat down to write this post a few times now. Sometimes, I stare at the blank page. Other times, it’s active distractions to get me in the mood to write. I’ll grab some coffee, find the right music, the right place to sit: like a dog spinning in place three times before flopping down to nap. And still, nothing. Yet here I am, typing away to try and get this done.
I believe I’m not alone in this. Whether it’s writing a blog or doing a home project that should take five minutes, sometimes I just need to take three months to think and plan and overanalyze (and avoid) the situation. Which is why the quote above really resonates with me. Just get moving. Get started. So what if it sucks?!
“Analysis paralysis” is a common experience for many of us. We really want something to be excellent, and in the struggle towards excellence, we stall– and then get in our own way. We need the project to be perfect before it can be released to the world. In college, a good friend of mine had a professor who would allow students to rewrite any paper they wanted to. The understanding was that writing is never really ever finished, it’s just abandoned. Sometimes good enough is good enough. And sometimes we just fail.
Which is weird. Most of us are terrified of failure. Students want perfect scores because the grades they get open up opportunities. In our careers mistakes can lead not just to missed opportunities but also being fired. We live in a world where mistakes are less likely than ever (on a basic survival level) to kill us, but we behave as if a “B” in 3rd grade means Harvard is off the table.
The truth is that failure is the greatest teacher. Our mistakes are our learning opportunities. How did I mess up? What could I do differently? What doesn’t work? How can I be better? The alternative is to always be perfect, an impossible set-up doomed to failure. So, if we are doomed to fail, why not embrace it? Lean in, knowing that you might get some dirt on your hands, a few scrapes, and be a little sore the next day?
Attempting life while expecting to fail sometimes feels like a better paradigm to be living than seeking perfection and being paralyzed or even immobilized by fear of failure. Instead of trying to always be perfect, I can instead be leaning in to adjusting and improving as I go. I can course correct, refine, and grow. Perfection is a static state, something frozen in time and unable to interact with the world- like a sculpture in stone.
So instead of striving for the impossible by being perfect, I can move forward in a process of becoming: an active, dynamic, vibrant process. Instead of every success being one of maintaining a perfect record, I can embrace the messy, flawed, wonderful process of becoming whatever my successes and failures are creating me to be. And that is the difference. I am not a static, stuck, perfect thing, but instead a growing learning becoming.