What would you do if you knew you could not fail?
I've heard a lot of people say that--er, rather post that.
If you could not fail...
It's actually a fascinating premise, the idea of not failing. I have a number of things that I think I would do if I could not fail.
- Be a professional MLB catcher: Buster Posey owns the diamond. Something that I've never known, except in some distant mirror world as a center fielder.
- Be a MotoGP pilot. I imagine there is nothing like it. I've only had dreams of the speed and control that somebody like Rossi commands.
- Be a singer like Mike Patton. That world of sound construction is a blaze that will forever fascinate me. Lungs unleashed.
- Be a writer like F. Scott Fitzgerald. To encapsulate the American ethos in such a beautiful and condemned manner is transcendent.
- Be an artist like Berkeley Breathed. To understand and create characters that are bits of everyone's evolution and to do it with a reverence for human flaw borders on precious.
I will not be any of these. I am left handed and too old to catch, too unbred to race, too scared to sing, too myopic in my discourse to write the American Failure and too petty to get to the empathy and grace that it takes to comic--that is now a verb.
And while I will be none of these things in particular, I think all these pinnacle characters that I place as the masters of their world are tied together in one thing. Failure.
Games. Pages. Races. Stories, Jokes. Thousands of them. All losses and many simply head shaking travesties of misjudgment.
But as Seth Godin tends to note:
"The person that fails the most, wins."
I had a professor back in film school who said something that stuck with me in a much more practically applicable way:
"You're going to make 10,000 mistakes before you start to get good, so you better start fucking things up. Just don't screw up the same way twice, that'll get you fired."
Putting those two things together, it becomes obvious that the sooner we can accept the fact that we don't know everything out of the womb and that it's asinine to think otherwise and we're going to fall on our ass--a lot if we want to be really good--we need to accept that failure is the only way to grow.
That said, it's probably worthy to note that success is going to running screaming from you if you keep doing the same dumb shit over and over. To further Godin's real point from his quote; if you go too big and miss you won't get another shot, you'll be broke, broken or dead. So to fail often, you have to survive a marathon, not a game of Russian Roulette.