dealing with failure

act in the face of change and not just feel, you will fail along the way. This is inevitable. There may be some small sliver of the population that populates that extreme end of the “luck” bell curve where everything goes right, but most of us live in the vast center where things go right and things go wrong with annoyingly equal frequency. Failure is a natural consequence of trying things. It is neither bad nor good. It simply is. Most of us have been taught to fear failure. Rather than fearing failure, I suggest you accept its presence and consider looking to minimize the effects of it. When you start to act take reasonable steps. If you decided to do a parachute jump, you wouldn’t strap on a chute and head up in the first plane! Well, I hope you wouldn’t. More likely, you would contact someone who has done jumps before and is either an instructor or can refer you to one. They would start you on a series of lessons on packing the chute, landing, etc. After extensive practice and learning you might go up and do a tandem jump to get the feel of it. All of these “baby” steps minimize the effect of a failure. If you land wrong when you jump from 3 feet, you might have sore ankles or legs for a day, but that is better than a couple of broken legs or worse. You still might “fail” but the consequences are far less dire.]]>