“To do something that you feel in your heart that’s great, you need to make a lot of mistakes. Anything that’s successful is a series of mistakes.”
Billie Joe Armstrong
I’ve been obsessed with failure lately. Although we think of failure as the opposite of success, they are two sides of the same coin. Each failure takes you closer to where you want to be. As Albert Einstein once said, “Failure is success in progress.” For many people, failure sounds like a bad word and while certain cultures celebrate failure, most find it shameful.
In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, Mark Manson said “Improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures, and the magnitude of your success is based on how many things you’ve failed at something.” In other words, be willing to fail because there’s no growth without it. “Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple. Double your rate of failure.” Thomas J. Watson said.
How can we celebrate failure? In my case, I created a Notion page I call “Failure Folder” where I write down everything I’ve failed at. I write down stories and post pictures. If I ever succeed in certain areas, I’ll go back to that folder and see that it was all because of those failures. In the end, the relationship between success and failure is a close one. You can’t have one without the other. Yet we feel incredibly frustrated when we fail at something.
I think it’s time to demystify this idea of perfection. What we need to do isn’t to choose a field or area where we’re most good at, what we need to do is to find something we enjoy despite making mistakes. The secret to life might be finding the one thing we’re willing to endure, even when things don’t go according to plan because they rarely will.