Failure is Misused

Perseverance and wielding failure

Failure and the fear of failure, since time immemorial, has prevented humanity from hearing beautiful songs, reading riveting stories, experiencing beautiful artwork, and seeing people reach their potentials. What we need to realize is that failure is not our enemy, it is a tool by which we can achieve our goals. It is a rope we can climb to the top of Olympus, a rocket ship to the moon, and the key to unlocking our greatness. Everyone makes mistakes, but not everyone learns from them. Through humility, acceptance of failure and the analysis of it, we can become who we want to be.

To achieve our goals, we have to allow ourselves to be taught by our mistakes, but also, we must exercise perseverance. Perseverance is the courage that conquers the fear of failure, the power to see mistakes as lessons, and the indomitable will that puts a sentence to paper amid writer’s block.

It is easy to say these things, but like many mindsets, its integration into your life is as a skill that needs to be practiced. Words are not enough; we have to act. Fortunately, there are actionable methods and concepts that have helped me to enter this mindset: the Zeigarnik effect, and the shitty first draft.

The Zeigarnik effect

For every day of the pandemic I have vowed to write an article. This is my fourth article in as many days. I have used the same method each time to complete this task. For each article I open my word processor and litter it with the most atrocious outline (more on this later) brimming with half-sentences and half-thoughts. By doing this my brain is always drawn back to finishing these ideas in a phenomenon known as the Zeigarnik effect. I use this for writing, but it can be implemented into all kinds of projects.

The Zeigarnik effect is a psychological occurrence that details how incomplete tasks are more easily recalled by the brain, bringing more attention to these unfinished undertakings and potentially spurring us into action. My focus is not of a razor-sharp writer who sits at his laptop and finishes his piece without so much as a blink. No, I pace around my apartment, send texts, and juggle. However, by using the Zeigarnik effect, I ensure that I am always drawn back to my work; scratching the impulsive itch of finishing what I started. And to make things easier for myself, as I rarely start with anything good, I have found the shitty first draft.

The shitty first draft

The shitty first draft, a concept popularized by Anne Lamott in her book Bird by Bird, is as simple as it sounds. It entails putting something, anything, onto your paper, your canvas, or whatever your vessel of expression might be, without setting obscenely high expectations on it. This is where the humility for learning from failure is seen in evidence. To do this we have to realize that our first efforts in any endeavor are not going to be the ideal image we have in our head. To bring forth that image we first have to act, damning the fear of failure, and make consistent efforts to reach our goal. With our shitty first draft we have a block of marble to chip into a statue, words and sentences ready to be crafted into something beautiful rather than the blank page written by perfection.

You can apply the shitty first draft to other pursuits as well. Just as you are not going to write Nobel-Peace Prize literature as soon as you set to writing, nor will you bench 200 pounds in your first month at the gym. We need to allow ourselves to be pleased with efforts that are not perfection. By doing this we give ourselves the chance to reach our goals without feeling the disappointments of not reaching immediate success.

Closing thoughts

Failure, for as long as the idea has existed has been improperly utilized. It needs to be adopted as a vehicle of learning and growth towards our goals, not as a roadblock that halts improvement. In its current state it is a dry well, filled with the coins of wishes not granted.

If no one reads this article I could consider it a failure, but instead I can choose to see how I accomplished a task and passed a few hours in a time where a pandemic offered me weeks of repose. There are positives in most things, if we are willing to look.

In the past few years I have not once failed, I have learned.

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