For a long time I was very proud of the fact that no girl I had attempted to kiss had given me the cheek. I thought that this meant that I was a precision sniper of dating, finely attuned to the subtleties of the male-female dynamic. I knew when girls wanted that first kiss to happen and had been right every time.
I mentioned this to someone and they said something like, “Well, you’re probably playing it way too safe then. You’ve avoided rejection, but you’ve probably not kissed a bunch of girls who wanted you to kiss them.”
The wind was taken out of my sails immediately. I had been looking at it all wrong this whole time. Something I took as a sign of success was actually a sign of a different sort of failure.
If you never fail, you are leaving success on the table. It’s comforting to imagine that you are perfect, but perhaps more likely that you aren’t pushing far enough past your comfort zone.
Haven’t ever failed to close a sale? You aren’t pitching enough people. Have always lifted the exact amount of weight attempted? You aren’t lifting enough? Haven’t ever crashed your car? Okay, maybe you don’t need to push everything…
In a world of uncertainty it’s difficult to know how much is too much. Are you pushing too much? Not enough? Many paths are paved with failure but lead to a single all-important success. So sometimes when you’re failing you should keep going. You only need to marry one person. Your business only needs to leap into profitability once. It’s hard to know if you’re doomed for failure or if that rare success is right around a corner.
The other end is easier to evaluate, though. If you aren’t ever failing, and if an individual failure isn’t catastrophic, you’re probably not pushing hard enough. Accept the emotional hit of failure, give it a shot anyway, and be comforted by the fact that failure means that you’re at least in the right ballpark in terms of moving past your comfort zone. And enjoy the successes you wouldn’t have otherwise found.
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Photo is from Cha Garden at the Lucky Dragon casino in Las Vegas. It’s a brand new tea room that is easily the best in Vegas (and one of the best in the US)
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