“The only people who don’t make any mistakes are those who never try anything new.” Earl Nightingale, in Insight #71

“One of the reasons mature people are apt to learn less than young people is that they’re willing to risk less.” John W. Gardner, in Self-Renewal.

“Men will always be making mistakes, as long as they’re striving after something.” Goethe

What’s your score in the ‘willingness to fail’ department? As children, we were always failing. But we always got up and tried again. Literally, in the case of learning to walk. Did you fall once and then quit? Of course not. You kept trying and trying until you were finally motoring along on your little two feet.

It’s only after we start moving into adulthood that we begin to fear failure. Unfortunately, this fear is encouraged by our parents. Teaching you to fear failure was not their desired outcome, but it was the result of shielding you from the consequences of trying and failing. You learned, if you’re like most people, to be afraid of the process. Maybe you associated embarassment to failure, or anger. Whatever it was, you attached a level of pain to failing, and over the years you stopped trying, stopped leaving your comfort zone to do new and unknown things.

Change the pain to pleasure! Condition yourself to embrace failure, because you can be pretty sure that if you’re not failing at something or other in your life, you’re not learning anything. And that’s the worst failure of all.