FAILURE IS THE WAY FORWARD

FAILURE IS THE WAY FORWARD

I am sure I would be telling the truth, saying how lucky I was graduating from the college year 2007 during the start of the great recession, attempting to enter the worst job market in eighty years.

It was around this time I discovered that my subtenant had not paid her rent for three months, and after confrontation, she broke down and left. It eft my roommate and  I to take care of all other expenses which hit hard on my savings.  Unfortunately, this led to me sleeping on a friend’s couch for half a year, doing small jobs having close to none debts while looking for a “real job”..

Lucky was I for entering the adult world as a failure made me start from scratch. This is practically everyone’s fear as one has to start a new business-changing career or to quit terrible jobs, which I got to experience. Things could only get while getting to sleep on the worst of mattresses counting coins, wondering whether I could afford a meal waiting for answers to my already sent out resumes. Starting blogs and stupid online businesses didn’t sound that bad. Nevertheless, quitting wasn’t an option for me as projects created, and posts wrote were recognized. I would probably be back to square one if all that effort hadn’t been put, making me a failure. That word alone gives me goosebumps. If my purpose had been being a peace revolutionary between 2007 and 2008, I would have been stinking rich by now. If finding a job to pay for my bill was my purpose, I would have been a total failure. I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth where money was used to avoid problems rather than solve them. This taught me that making money for me was lousy as one can have a lot of it and still be miserable while one can be penniless and be happy. Why then make money as a measure of self-worth. My self-worth, however, was different as it was freedom. I always wanted to be an entrepreneur to be my boss; hence working online appealed to me. This made me wonder whether I’d rather be earning on a job I hated or play online entrepreneur. Obviously, the latter opted for me. If trying and failing for a few years, leaving me to look for a job, would I have lost anything? That was a no for me. Instead of being a broke non-experienced twenty-two youth, I’d rather be broke non experienced at twenty-five. With this self-worth, failure to me was not broke, sleeping on my friends or family couch, which I did for the next two years, or a blank resume but instead lacking to run my projects.
THE FAILURE/SUCCESS PARADOX

When Pablo Picasso was an older man, he was in Spain in a restaurant while fooling around with a used napkin drawing whatever amused him on spilled coffee. This was like how small boys draw their penises on bathroom walls except that for Picasso it he was more of an impressionist.

Anyway, some woman sitting near him was looking on in awe. After afew moments, Picasso finished his coffee and crumpled up the napkin tothrow away as he left.The woman stopped him. “Wait,” she said. “Can I have that napkin youwere just drawing on? I’ll pay you for it.”
“Sure,” Picasso replied. “Twenty thousand dollars.”The woman’s head jolted back as if he had just flung a brick at her.“What? It took you like two minutes to draw that.”“No, ma’am,” Picasso said. “It took me over sixty years to draw this.”He stuffed the napkin in his pocket and walked out of the café.Improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures, andthe magnitude of your success is based on how many times you’ve failedat something. If someone is better than you at something, then it’s likelybecause she has failed at it more than you have. If someone is worse thanyou, it’s likely because he hasn’t been through all of the painful learningexperiences you have.If you think about a young child trying to learn to walk, that child willfall down and hurt itself hundreds of times. But at no point does that childever stop and think, “Oh, I guess walking just isn’t for me. I’m not good atit.”
Avoiding failure is something we learn at some later point in life. I’msure a lot of it comes from our education system, which judges rigorouslybased on performance and punishes those who don’t do well. Anotherlarge share of it comes from overbearing or critical parents who don’t lettheir kids screw up on their own often enough, and instead punish them fortrying anything new or not preordained. And then we have all the massmedia that constantly expose us to stellar success after success, while notshowing us the thousands of hours of dull practice and tedium that wererequired to achieve that success.
At some point, most of us reach a place where we’re afraid to fail,where we instinctively avoid failure and stick only to what is placed infront of us or only what we’re already good at.Improvement in anything is based on the tiny failures one has to go through. If someone is good at anything it is probably because they have failed for a very long time but never stopped. Similarly, if someone is poor in something it is probably that they have undergone less hustle to do it. If you can think of a child who is training to walk, him or her falls a lot but never has he or she stopped and said maybe walking isn’t my thing. This can be termed as fear to fail. This should never be an option for you. One is supposed to understand that failure is key to success as one improves a lot from one’s own mistake. A lot of fear to fail is fuelled by our educational systems where one fears punishment. This makes people do whatever it takes to succeed even if it is wrong. Another fuelling factor is parents that don’t want their children to fail and punishes them if they happen to fail. This is completely inappropriate. The media is another factor where it criticizes those who fail. Who honestly would love to be the laughing stock of everyone? This makes everyone seek perfectness. This confines us. We can truly succeed at things we are ready to fail at. We all must remember that success doesn’t come without failure. A lot of this fear comes from useless values where we measure our standards according to people, we meet hence lowering our standards in a way that it is left at the mercy of other people’s judgement. I can live my life based on my own values and happiness whether I’ll fail or not. Shitty values like this are based on outside goals beyond our control. They leave us empty eventually after we achieve them since there are no more goals to be achieved after that. Better values such as expressing yourself honestly to other people. Honesty is a value often undermined. Most people are just not themselves. Every new conversation, relationship brings new
challenges and opportunities for honest expression. Honesty is an
ongoing, lifelong process that degrades completion. If your measure for worldly standard success is by having sleek cars and mansionates then you are completely wrong. This is because you can work your ass out and achieve them and after that you are left with nothing to do but in your middle life crisis hit you and the problem that drove you your whole life is taken away. There is suddenly no more room for growth yet it is growth that brings happiness in one’s life not arbitrary achievements.

In this sense, goals, as they are conventionally defined—graduate fromcollege, buy a lake house, lose fifteen pounds—are limited in the amountof happiness they can produce in our lives. They may be helpful whenpursuing quick, short-term benefits, but as guides for the overall trajectoryof our life, they suck.Picasso remained prolific his entire life. He lived into his nineties andcontinued to produce art up until his final years. Had his metric been“Become famous” or “Make a buttload of money in the art world” or“Paint one thousand pictures,” he would have stagnated at some pointalong the way. He would have been overcome by anxiety or self-doubt. Helikely wouldn’t have improved and innovated his craft in the ways he diddecade after decade.The reason for Picasso’s success is exactly the same reason why, as anold man, he was happy to scribble drawings on a napkin alone in a café.
His underlying value was simple and humble. And it was endless. It wasthe value “honest expression.” And this is what made that napkin sovaluable.

PAIN IS PART OF THE PROCESS

In the 1950’s a Polish psychologist named Kazimierz Dombrowski studied the survivors of then world war II. They had experienced traumatic experiences considering that they were in Poland where they underwent cruelty such as starvation, bombings, city destructions, murders of friends and families, rape cases by those they were at logger heads with. This was quite an experience as it is horrific to me even though I did not experience it. After the study Dombrowski found out that those affected by the war had positively been affected by it as they had become more happier and even hardworking. They were more confident and surer of themselves. Obviously, they all had been left with scars but some of them had turned those scars to the betterment of themselves.

They aren’t alone in this as many of us after painful experiences we become stronger, more resilient and more grounded. A good example is a cancer survivor becoming fuller of life and an increased will to live for many see that as surviving death itself. Surely that’s a great deal. After that study Dombrowski argued that pain and being hurt are not only there to torture us but to help us grow and even move on. Pain is a medium of psychological growth. Denying it is denying our own potential. One must suffer physical pain to build one’s body desirably to the person. Nevertheless, emotional pain is a key to someone developing pain resilience.

Our radical changes mostly happen at the tail end of our worst moments. We often question ourselves at our worst asking where we have gone wrong and how can we change that. Many people view it as hitting the rock bottom but I’d rather call it weathering from one’s old self to a new being but since we are different, the name doesn’t matter but how you view the situation. You may have experienced a painful situation as contrary thought. That is the beginning and it’s good as that is what is called as pain is the process. If you just cover it up with substances such as drugs or activities then you will not have generated the real motivation to actual change. For instance, as I grew up whenever a new stereo was bought, I pressed every button to see how it worked and unplugged and plugged back very plug to see how it would work. I was the only one with such curiosity and my parents were amazed at how I could use a new stereo without using a manual. There’s another incident of a girl whose parents are immigrants. They have saved their whole lives to put her in med school and now that she’s there she hates it and wants to quit but she’s unable to and opts to email me on how she can drop out if med school. All the questions I get feel difficult to solve from each person’s perspective but very easy for someone not experiencing that. The answer here is pain. This is because it is extremely painful for one to drop out of me school breaking one’s parents’ hearts. I would want to imagine that. It is even very hard to walk up to some stranger and ask them questions. Honestly for me it was close to impossible and I would suffer alone asking myself endless questions.I struggled with social anxiety throughout much of my adolescenceand young adult life. I spent most of my days distracting myself withvideo games and most of my nights either drinking or smoking away myuneasiness. For many years, the thought of speaking to a stranger—especially if that stranger happened to be particularlyattractive/interesting/popular/smart—felt impossible to me. I walked
around in a daze for years, asking myself dumb VCR questions:“How? How do you just walk up and talk to a person? How cansomebody do that?”
I had all sorts of screwed-up beliefs about this, like that you weren’tallowed to speak to someone unless you had some practical reason to, orthat women would think I was a creepy rapist if I so much as said, “Hello.”The problem was that my emotions defined my reality. Because it feltlike people didn’t want to talk to me, I came to believe that people didn’t
want to talk to me. And thus, my VCR question: “How do you just walk upand talk to a person?”Because I failed to separate what I felt from what was, I was incapableof stepping outside myself and seeing the world for what it was: a simpleplace where two people can walk up to each other at any time and speak.Many people, when they feel some form of pain or anger or sadness,drop everything and attend to numbing out whatever they’re feeling. Theirgoal is to get back to “feeling good” again as quickly as possible, even ifthat means substances or deluding themselves or returning to their shittyvalues. 1Learn to sustain the pain you’ve chosen. When you choose a new value, you are choosing to introduce a newform of pain into your life.
Relish it. Savor it. Welcome it with open arms. Then act despite it.I won’t lie: this is going to feel impossibly hard at first. But you canstart simple. You’re going to feel as though you don’t know what to do.But we’ve discussed this: you don’t know anything. Even when you thinkyou do, you really don’t know what the fuck you’re doing. So really, whatis there to lose?Life is about not knowing and then doing something anyway. All of lifeis like this. It never changes. Even when you’re happy. Even when you’refarting fairy dust. Even when you win the lottery and buy a small fleet ofJet Skis, you still won’t know what the hell you’re doing. Don’t everforget that. And don’t ever be afraid of that.

THE “DO SOMETHING” PRINCIPLE
In 2008 after working for only six weeks I eventually gave up to start an online business. By then I had no idea what I was doing but all I knew is that I would be miserably broke.  But at least I would be working on my own terms was what consoled me. By then all I was ever interested in was dating and it hit my mind; should I start my own dating blog? That I gladly did but I can’t promise you that the results were satisfying. By morning when I was self-employed, I was shocked. It was then I realised that I had to learn how to run my computer only keeping myself busy with games I had downloaded avoiding work by all means. As the weeks went by my account had gone from worse to worst and it was crystal clear I had to start something and had to come up with ideas. This was however unexpected where I got my idea from. I remembered Mr packer my high school math’s teacher who often said that if you are stuck in a problem don’t just sit on it rather work on it for that would help one to start having ideas. Mr Packer’s advice suddenly beckoned me and I started to think of all those uncomfortable months in my life were the ones I had probably learnt a lot. Many of us commit action to motivation and motivation to only feel emotional inspiration assuming that it is a series of actions. For instance, if you want to do something but you lack motivation you feel like you have totally failed. The truth is that motivation is not only a three-chain reaction but an endless circle. If you lack motivation do something and take is as motivation towards your goal. This I call the DO-SOMETHING PRINCIPLE. After I applied it, I taught it to my readers who were stranded like I was. It would honestly work for me where I would motivate myself and end up doing the largest of tasks I had. The do something principle makes us feel not threatened by failure instead we propel ourselves forward, free to fail, get rid of procrastination and adopt new values. If you feel that you need to do something and don’t have any idea on how to do it just do something and you won’t regret. Be your own motivation.