We all know that one person. Likely we know multiple flavours of
that one person, but let's just generalise for simplicity here.
That
one person of whom I speak has the Great Idea. Or above-average
talent. There's no reason why they shouldn't do/make The Thing (whatever
it is) that would make the world better. Except that they're being
stalked by failure. And so your offers to link them with people people
who could help them are sabotaged, if not rebuffed outright. Your
encouragement disappears into a black hole. The time, you see, is never
quite right. There are too many people willing and able to take
advantage of them.
We might, even to a fractional degree, be that one person at some point in our lives. You know, making up excuses before we even do or make The Thing.
The bad news is that we will fail. The good news is that we will fail more than once.
Which
sounds illogical until you consider how empowering that is. Give
yourself permission to fail, and you will be more than equipped for the
next failure. And the next. And so on.
Giving
yourself permission to fail is not the same as making excuses ahead of
time. The saying goes that it's better to seek forgiveness than to ask
permission. This is one of the glaring exceptions to that rule. Even
so, seeking forgiveness for failure is likewise not at all the same as
making excuses.
Excuses are pernicious things, and can
rob us twice. They allow us to declare bankruptcy on our responsibility
for The Thing not working out the first time. But they can also give
us a pass on learning from failure. Which makes it less likely that we
will try another way to make/do The Thing...or The New Thing.
But
with the permission to fail, it's incumbent on us to clearly define
"failure" from the outset. How will we know what failure looks like?
What's the plan for changing course to avoid a crash? What can we
salvage in the event we crash anyway? Sure, those questions take some
CPU cycles. Then again, so does sweating the timing of The Thing, or
paranoia that someone will steal The Thing from you.
Now,
if my Gentle Reader will excuse me, I have to go practice what I preach
and fire off an email or two so that I can get back to The Thing in
earnest.
