When my family would play monopoly, I would quit the game when my financial situation became dicey. If I didn’t believe I had enough money to cover the likely rent or payments, I would walk away from the game. This is probably amazing financial insight for a child, but there’s more to it. I didn’t want to lose.
I am what you would consider risk averse. I do my best to avoid crises of all types, and to me failure is certainly one I don’t want to experience. I have found the best strategy to reach that goal is to sit back and do nothing. Or if I have started something, the best course of action is to abandon that project. Because you never try, you never get a bad result. And if you quit, no one can say you officially lost. As you might imagine, this means that I don’t really have many chances to succeed. I can’t win if I don’t play.
In a video I just watched, the creator said this, “The less open you are to failure, the less open you are to success.” I didn’t like that, or rather what it made me think. I made me realize that I am going about things all wrong. I need to open myself up to the possibility of failure. I need to try more things. I need to make more mistakes, even if those mistakes are public. But how do you do that? How do you open yourself up to failure?
Maybe it is by letting it happen, but feeling the failure and realizing you can come back from it. I won’t be coming from the angle that, “Failure is the greatest teacher,” and that you should just treat every failure as a lesson. No, I am not that open to it. To even get to that point, I have see first that failure is survivable. For me it is okay to try new things, to put myself out there, to work towards my goals even it doesn’t work out because that is not the end. That to lose a game of Monopoly isn’t as soul-crushing as your ten year-old self thinks it is because I will be able to come back and play again another day.
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A Wren Says 