If You’re Not Scared, You’re Not Even Trying

I came across a Youtube video one day, where Denzel Washington (my favorite actor if you must know) was giving a speech and those words came out of his mouth:

“If you don’t fail, you’re not even trying.”

I believe that failure-avoidance has a component of fear in it, and since fear covers more cases than just failure, I decided to tweak the quote a little.

I have been afraid to fail so many times in my life, often choosing the path of least resistance.

Looking into my history, some people could argue that I have taken on great challenges, but only I know, deep down, that I have never really tapped into my full potential, yet.

How do I know that? I never really failed, as in someone coming up to me and telling me, to my face, that I’m not up to the task, although, trust me, it sure felt that way a few times. Have you heard of imposter symdrome?

Maybe I just have a personal bias towards wanting to fail miserably so as to be liberated from the distress of having regrets in the future for not eploiting my potential. I’m human, I have my own things to figure out.

Going all the way is about playing with our limits, and going beyond.

Sometimes it can mean falling short, and thereby learning about ourselves further, course correct, balancing our needs etc.

Doing my research, though, I am yet to find examples of successful people who have never failed prior to reaching their desired outcome.

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life.”

— Michael Jordan

Failure is just part of the process of experimenting; actually we should just call it experimenting.

Real failure is when we stop trying. It is when we go down and do not get back up.