“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.

Something happened to me a month or so ago that drove home again just how powerful the imagination is.

Background: I am not visually oriented. For instance, I can objectively sit and watch a movie. It looks like…a movie. On the other hand, when I read, I am there. With the characters. I feel, hear, smell, see, and think what they think. A quirk of my mind, maybe, but I have that ability.

So I was reading a book where one of the characters was going underground into an old mine for some reason or another. As she crawled, the passage ceiling progressively got lower and lower, until the only way she could move was to stretch her arms above her head, grab with her hands and pull while she used her toes to push.

I’m thinking to myself as I was reading, “There’s no way I’d ever make it through something like this.” Then I took notice. My breathing was faster, my chest was constricted, my skin was tingling. I thought, “Whoa.”

Continuing reading, I was trying to stay aware of my physiology because my reactions amazed me. All at once, in the story, the ceiling caved in on our hero’s legs, her light went out. She was trapped. No one knew she was there, the weight of the dirt and rocks on her body was tremendous; she was suffocating. As I read this, I noticed my physical reaction. I was literally in panic mode. I was sweating, my breathing and heart rates were off the scales. I was scared to death! And I was still sitting in my chair.  • Read the rest of this entry »

After reading some negative reviews about Tony Robbins materal, and Stephen Covey material, and other personal-development guru/coach/instructor materials, I came away with a reinforced distinction: take what you need and leave the rest.

You know, who cares that Mr. Robbins thinks a Big Mac has 5MHz of energy? Over the years, I’ve read so much from so many authors that was just so much garbage it’s ridiculous. You, as a reader, have to be smart enough to take what’s offered and apply it to your own life.

If you think food has electrical energy and believing so helps you enhance your health, more power to you. If believing that gets you off the fence and convinces you to take better care of yourself, it’s all good. You could think that all chocolate has little green Martians inside that will eat your stomach lining. If it keeps you from eating too much chocolate, then you accomplished your goal. You didn’t violate any of your principals, so who cares how you got there?

The whole point of this post is to emphasize this distinction: if you see something here that you don’t agree with, don’t use it! Who cares? Use what you need, and leave the rest. Be smart about your education, enlightenment, and growth.

I will tell you one thing: as you learn, your beliefs change. Duh! I told in an earlier post how I thought my wife’s little “cancel cancel” routine was ludricous, until I gained more knowledge. So, who knows? Maybe food does have electrical energy and I just don’t know enough yet. Maybe it doesn’t. But I don’t let whether it does or doesn’t cloud my ability to evaluate knowledge that’s offered and use what I can to grow.