Confessions of a Habitual Failure

I suck.  I am a failure.  I have tried so many things this last year that have not worked.  I still haven’t held a single job or been with a single company for more than 2 years.  I still haven’t followed-through on a business idea.  I have a nice laundry-list of ideas I’ve tried to instigate that haven’t worked out.  Oh, and lots of parenting techniques, art ambitions, and relationship strategies that have blown up in my face.

I have never been so proud of myself.

BWAH-HA-HA!!!  

It's true.  A few years back, I was told a very eye-opening, paradigm-changing story.  As a lifelong perfectionist, this information was vital to my progress.

(Disclaimer, I’m telling this story from memory, so I may not have all the details exactly correct).  A study was done to determine how children learn and progress best.  In this study, children were divided into two groups and asked to replicate a certain picture through drawing.  One group was asked to draw the picture as many times as possible in the allotted timeframe, while the other was asked to simply draw it once and get it as accurate as possible on the first try.  Which group drew the best picture?  The first group.

This is becoming a well-known fact now in the business world, but it’s becoming more and more apparent to the world in general that the more mistakes you make, the more times you try, the more times you fail, the faster and greater you improve.  This goes completely against my upbringing and attitude as a young adult – my goal was to always get it right the first time, and I exercised great control over myself to make that happen.  I see now that that attitude stunted my growth in many ways for years.

So this last few years, so full of mistakes, failures, feable attempts, and overly-ambitious plans has truly been the most accomplished several years of my life.  In a lot of ways, I’m writing this post for myself because I still haven’t figured out what “I want to be when I grow up”.  Maybe the answer to that question is that I will just keep trying and exploring new things for the rest of my life without ever settling on one.  Who knows?  But for now, I have a nice growing portfolio of failures that will someday serve to uncover that discovery! (in some ways, literally, now that I have a bit of an “art” portfolio started – which believe me, has some real hogs in it!!).

So here’s to more mistakes, more lessons, more screwing up, more ruining perfectly good potential, and maybe…someday… seeing it pay off.

Made any big mistakes lately?  I highly recommend you get started!  It's the most awful blessing you will ever give yourself.

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