Confidence Through Failure
Take-aways:
- Do something you’re scared of. Something that stands between you and a goal.
- Try something out of a self-help book, if nothing comes to mind.
- Succeed. Or fail and learn that life goes on.
- Gain confidence.
Confidence Through Failure
All too frequently people say things like, "I could never do that" or "I could never do what he/she does."
As a child, when I uttered such negative pronouncements, my mom responded, "Not with that attitude you can’t."
I heard this response so often it made me sick. I hated hearing it, because she was right, but I wasn’t ready to accept blame for my own self-sabotage.
Most people have no idea how easy it is to program a computer, to run a marathon, to do almost anything. I’m not saying that these things are trivial. I literally mean that most people simply don’t know what is and is not involved. When they claim that they could never do it, they are assuming that they fundamentally lack the capacity for things that they have never tried.
"We do not try things because they are hard, they are hard because we do not try them."
~Seneca (Source)
The benefits of encouragement and positive reinforcement on a child’s development are well known, but a lot of children aren’t getting encouragement from their teachers, peers, or parents and these children have become the adults who disparage their own abilities before they have even been tested.
Confidence is not something easily gained and there is nothing I can say that will produce it in other people, but I can encourage.
My goal throughout this series of articles is to provide physical actions that can be undertaken for physical, mental, and emotional progress in our lives. Here is my physical action recommendation for how to gain confidence:
Fail.
Pick any activity or action, preferably one you are avoiding out of fear. Try that activity. If you succeed, great. Pick another activity and go after it. Repeat with the next desired and feared action.
If you fail, be depressed. Time will pass. You will get over it. Look back and realize that life goes on. Maybe you already have failed. Congratulations. You’re past step one already.
It sounds simple, but is hard in practice. Overcoming our emotions is the hardest thing we ever do. If this isn’t working for you, get The 4-Hour Workweek and read the part about facing fears, or seek another book or website that discusses addressing fears. If you succeeded at failing, examine what went wrong.
The following tips are taken from Wired magazine:
Fail, accept defeat.
The Neuroscience of Screwing Up
Check your assumptions. Ask yourself why this result feels like a failure. Does it contradict a theory? Maybe the hypothesis failed, not the experiment.
Seek out the ignorant. Talk to people who are unfamiliar with your experiment (this can also apply to non-science-oriented failures, though you might just seek out a friend). Explaining your work in simple terms may help you see it in a new light.
Encourage diversity. If everyone working on a problem speaks the same language, then everyone has the same set of assumptions.
Beware of failure-blindness. It’s normal to filter out information that contradicts our preconceptions. The only way to avoid that bias is to be aware of it.
Extras:
In this article, 8 famous people discuss what they learned from failure.
An award-winning math professor (who taught me incidentally) discusses math and failure.
Emotional sturdiness is not the only benefit of recovering from failure, expanded awareness is another.
If you aren’t sweating a little, you aren’t choosing difficult enough tasks. Beware of artificial progress, which I’ll address next.
