Collective Genius!

Guilty as charged

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This topic is rather interesting for me to write about.

When I was younger, I would find a way to try things that interested me.
Because of this, I've seen work as a fencing instructor, jazz musician, programmer/analyst and a brewer in a microbrewery.

I've had a real "Why not ?!?" attitude. But, age and a few truely massive failures have tempered my attitude. So, when you ask what advice I'd give to someone afraid of failure I'll be giving the advice to myself, too.

Look at what you've done in the past.
What has been a memorable success? How did it feel? How did you get there? What was the process/path you took to engineer that success? 

Now do the same for a memorable failure.
What was the difference between the success and failure?

I'll go out on a limb and say it was probably preparation and commitment. If you have prepared to the best of your ability and will put in some work, chances of failure become less and less.

So:
Decide what you want. Where do you want to go? If you don't know, you'll probably end up somewhere else.
Commit and prepare for that decision.  Commitment doesn't mean quitting your job and selling your house. It means looking at your goal and holding it in your heart as something you really want. Preparation means putting in some work or study so you will know what to expect when you experience some of the bumps in the road. There'll still be surprises, but you'll be better able to handle them. You won't be perfect or an expert (yet), but trust your heart and enjoy the work.
Take action.Do something, even a small something, to move forward. If it feels good, do more.
If not, go back to preparation.

Hopefully I can take my own advice.

Heading Back to School

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It's all good.

Actually it's great.

And yet I feel intimidated as hell.

Starting this Friday, I am back in school. I am starting an MFA program with an 8 day residency intensive. I will be surrounded by literary writers.

I am am just a little old business writer. Oh, the feelings of inadequacy!

So here is what I have decided. I am going to soak in the feelings and embrace the role of learner. I WILL raise my hand to share my poems even though I fear being laughed at or, worse yet, pitied. "Oh, that poor little old business writer, she is so behind everyone else. Must be hard."

Phooey - Yes, I know they won't likely think that, but I will think they think that. And if I think they think that then they might as well think that because when I think that it is real. Follow?

Embrace...soak...be INTO the not knowing. That's my plan.

My back up plan is to appear obtuse and act like people don't get me. I'm guessing they'd see right through that so I better stick with jumping in with both feet.

Submitted by Lisa Haneberg, Management Craft blog, and little old business writer.

A Gold Sash at 53!

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Somehow the word failure didn’t begin to describe my feelings at the end of 2002. I had managed to lose my job through downsizing- obviously I wasn’t good enough to keep. How was I going to find a new job at 50? Old women are a dime a dozen and no one even wants to spend a dime on them. At least that was my belief system at that point in time. Fear became a constant companion along with the tears and self pity.

I also got divorced that year- obviously wasn’t any good at that either despite 18 years of trying. How would I keep from losing my house, a cardboard box was OK for me, but the horse and dog and cat deserved better! I didn’t want to fail them.

Can’t say I enjoyed the rollercoaster ride I had strapped myself onto. Self doubt feed by the fear of failing kept me sleeping till noon, dreading the drudgery of searching pointlessly for a job that didn’t exist for someone my age. Plus I came to the realization I REALLY didn’t want to work in my field anymore. The prospect of nearly 20 years till retirement working at something I had no desire or passion for was suffocating. But what choices did I have, surely I would fail if I didn’t stick with what I knew, especially at this stage of the game. Mind you I was no loser, and I was always successful in the past when I tried new things- but starting all over at age 50, way to scary. Fear kept me locked on to the past, what I felt was safe, what I thought were the only avenues open to me. I was wearing a set of blinders that forced me to focus on a very narrow, unhealthy path I didn’t dare leave.

Fortunately, someone who believed in me paid my way to take a “reinventing yourself” class. Sitting there with the other (younger) displaced workers I began to feel at least I wasn’t a failure alone! We all worked through our ideals, values, ethics and I continued to think what a nice concept, but I can’t do this; I’m too old, there isn’t enough time left, I’d fail if I tried.

Then something clicked when I heard these words: “What if you had 20 more years, what would you do with them?” Wow, I certainly do have 20 more years at the least and I sure as hell didn’t want to keep going the way I was. Before this epiphany 20 years was an interminable time to suffer through until my blessed golden years of retirement. Now 20 years could be the beginning to a whole new life and possibly the career of my dreams.
It was really that simple, just seeing something I had dreaded in a whole new light. I only had to go to school for 2 years to accomplish my goal. All of a sudden this seemed doable.

When I was eleven, I wrote an essay on Veterinary Medicine, I forced my sister to bring her stuffed animals to my Animal Hospital, I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up! Fast forward to my junior year in high school. The guidance counselor says “there are no women vets”, OK I said, I’ll go to school for animal husbandry. “Your grades are too good to waste in a two year school program” they cried. You see animal husbandry was offered at Morrisville, a two year agricultural school. Since I wasn’t footing the educational bill, I ended up majoring in design, my art talents were God given and not to be wasted.

By May 2003 I had applied to Delhi College of Technology as a Veterinary Technician student, was accepted, sold my house packed up the horse, dog and cat and we moved to Franklin, NY.

Design- conceptual, ideas, speculation, theory. Veterinary Medicine- concrete, protocol, factual, life and death.

After the euphoria of the move and with three months before school begins, I started to worry. What if’s edged into my thoughts. What if the students don’t accept me, what if the professors don’t take me seriously, what if I can’t study and remember things anymore, what if I can’t keep up and look like a fool, what if I …. fail.

After wallowing in fear again, mostly about what others would think of me, it finally dawned on me that worry about what others thought wasn’t going to get me anywhere, I was doing this for me. The turning point in overcoming my feelings about failure came when it occurred to me I was finally exorcising that subconscious worm that had eaten into my brain over the years “If only I could have gone to school for Veterinary Medicine.” I had used that delicious refrain to soothe over so many hurts in the past that it was a balm for all evils. Life would not have been so cruel if only I had been allowed to do this.

What a wake up call! Here I was on the doorstep to my life’s passion, this is what I was meant to do with my life, I will not fail because this is my destiny! It may sound corny but the sun did shine brighter and the birds did sing sweeter once the reality of MY CHOICE had truly taken hold.

As it turned out professors love older students- they are there because they want to be, as vet tech students we were all in the same boat of heavy workloads and long nights of study. We all made fools of ourselves and had a grand time laughing and crying together. I can honestly say nothing I have every done has been more enjoyable or fulfilling than those 2 years of the most intense study and work I have ever undertaken.

In 2005 I graduated, Magna Cum Laude no less, with a beautiful gold sash! I passed my state boards with flying colors. Not only am I doing my life’s work and reveling in every moment of it, I have new lifelong friends from my school experience. Plus I have exciting and embarrassing stories to last me the rest of my life! Sure I made mistakes, but they are the best tools for learning. I conquered the fear of failure and replaced it with the drive to keep trying despite my (self -imposed) shortcomings.

The most valuable lessons I learned from going back to school, were not learned in the classroom. These lessons were the ones that changed my attitude about myself, my age, my capabilities and most importantly about failure. Not following your dreams and desire is failure, of the heart and spirit. I know there will be tough patches ahead, that’s life, but I also know I can’t fail, only move forward. I finally made my way to the path I was meant to be on and I plan to follow it wherever it leads!

I recommend to everyone who isn’t doing what they believe in their heart to be their live’s work to reevaluate where they are today and what tomorrow could actually be for them. I feel so fortunate that I didn’t turn my back on this opportunity when fear reared it ugly head trying to say- who do you think you are, you can’t do this.

I will proudly shout that I am finally the person I was meant to be and no one can prevent me from attaining whatever I desire.

Human life in this world is but as the form of a white pony flashing across a rock crevice- in a moment it is gone. Navajo Saying

We Need More Court Jesters

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When Curt emailed me about contributing to July's Collective Genius, I jumped at the chance to weigh in on this month's topic.  Teaching an MBA class on Creativity in Business, I've witnessed plenty of students who fall into the category of fearing failure and looking like a fool.  We've been conditioned to pass, to succeed, to compete, and to excel.  Failure is not an option, so we stifle our creativity and go with the flow.

After recently visiting England and getting a crash course on the history of the monarchy there, I've come to a very simple conclusion on the topic of fearing failure:  We need more Court Jesters.  For those not familiar with the role of a Court Jester, they were more than simply a clown employed to entertain the King.  They served a much more critical role than providing music and laughter.  They were generally the only ones in the court who could ridicule virtually everything.  (Sure, there may have been a fear of beheading if they went too far, but that threat applied universally in Medieval times.)

The Court Jester was the one who could challenge traditional, conventional wisdom by doing one thing:  making fun of it.  He might highlight the seemingly trivial elements of an idea, or he might downplay what everyone else was ooo-ing and ah-ing over.  He might parody the players connected with an idea so the king could see the idea in a new light.  He might reverse everything - logistically, chronologically, philosophically - allowing those in his audience to see it from different angles.  Regardless of how he accomplished it, the Court Jester was the one person whose perspective could rise above the knowledge of the King's advisors (translated:  yes men).

You see, there is only one sure way to fail:  to sell out your soul and your common sense and your intuition and your values to blindly go along with the crowd.  Even if the crowd turns out to be right on the one particular issue, you've ended up losing a small piece of yourself that will be difficult to regain.  The best ideas in history were not accomplished by being agreeable.  They were conceived in conflict, incubated in contention, birthed in debate, and developed in discourse.  The contrarian's mindset can take a good idea and make it better.  It can take a bad idea and turn it into something useful.  Regardless, the possibility of failure always looms on the horizon.

Do you want to overcome a fear of failure?  Become a Court Jester.  Are you afraid of looking like a fool?  Then look like a fool with purpose and panache.  Be contrary!  Make fun of all sides of an idea!  Buck the status quo!  And whether you stand on the podium with a trophy or on the sidelines with egg on your face, you will have fed your soul and had fun in the process.  Now get out there and CARPE FACTUM!

Submitted by Timothy Johnson of Carpe Factum (Seize the Accomplishment!)

Technorati Tags: Fear of Failure, Fools, Court Jester, Carpe Factum, Timothy Johnson

Stop fearing dust

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“Ignorance is the parent of fear.” – Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 3: On the first meeting with Queequeg

One bright spring day when I was 44 years old, over a sturdy cup of hot black coffee and a bowl of McCann’s slow-cooking, Steel Cut Irish Oatmeal topped with raspberries, I realized that I couldn’t tackle fear until I first got over my fear of being fearful.

Yes, that’s it—I needed to let go of the fear of fearfulness before I could tackle the bigger problem of fear itself, which—it turns out—is a gift, not a burden, since it tell us important things—things we actually need to know, not like the square root of Pi or the conjugation of verbs which we can always count on our friend Rosemary to tell us, but things about ourselves—those deep real selves, the ones that don’t show up on business cards, that one, there, the little one, the one we are left with when we are lying in bed looking at the ceiling. The still one. The one whose shadow looms large.

“I’m afraid of bees,” my 13-year-old daughter answered when I asked about her fears. “And you—well, you’re afraid of birds, bats, being buried alive,” she informed me, reminding me of her concept of erasable fears. Yes, I thought to myself, and not only being buried alive, but also being buried dead or in any shape or form, being found out, being forgotten, being laughed at. “Isn’t fear all mental?” she continued. Yes, I’d have to say it is, I replied.

And by knowing what we fear, don’t we know what we care about, how we are measuring our worth, what success looks like? I asked. So isn’t fear helpful, then?

I was in an ethics seminar last week, a session bringing together adults and high school students for a dialogue. Our facilitator asked us to read “Buddhist Economics” by E.F. Schumacher from his book, Small is Beautiful. A high school junior woke me up with her assessment of a complex situation, with a succinct honesty only the young are good at: “When my parents divorced, my father had more money than my mother, and they were always scared and angry. He was scared he would lose his money and she was angry that he had more than her.”

Not knowing is what makes us scared; being scared is what makes us angry. As Melville wrote, ignorance is the parent of fear. What if I fail? Who will love me then? How is this going to affect the rest of my life? What if they don’t like what I write? I don’t know them, they’re different from me, I’m afraid.

I’m angry that they can’t understand me; I’m scared that they might.

The brilliant book, Art & Fear, is my go-to book on the fear of creation. Go. Read it. Now. In it, David Bayles and Ted Orland write: “Fears about artmaking fall into two families: fears about yourself, and fears about your reception by others. In a general way, fears about yourself prevent you from doing your best work, while fears about your reception by others prevent you from doing your own work.” As Claude Bristol has written, “To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.”

T.S. Eliot wrote in The Waste Land:

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Dust, just dust, our shadow dust. Is no one following us but ourselves? Indeed. Embrace fear and listen to its messages—it is a part of you like your shadow is. When we know what we most fear, we know what we care most about, don’t we? So love fear, don’t fear it.

Do your own work. Do your best work.

-Patti Digh, 37days

 (Shadow image from Bitpuddle)

 

Overcoming fear of failure

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What advice would you give to someone who is stuck because a fear of failing / being wrong / looking stupid is keeping them from taking action?

If you think something is going to make you look stupid - at least temporarily with no long term repercussions for you or for others – I say do it.  It's good for you. That's how you learn. Heck, I've looked stupid thousands of times in my life, and I'm better, stronger and wiser because of it.  Looking stupid allowed me NOT to take myself, my life and my business so darn seriously. It keeps me real. Keeps me in check. And I think that as long as you don't make the same mistake twice, you're all good.

 

What techniques do you use to help move past that fear?

I once made a list of 50 of the stupidest things I ever did and what I learned from them. Once I read the list back to myself, I thought, "Man, maybe it's not so bad after all!" This is a great exercise that I recommend to all.

 

How has that fear kept you stuck in the past? How did you move past it?

I once had a fear of watching myself speak on video. I had footage from speeches that I didn't watch for almost a year! But I found that when I did watch it, I realized, "Hmm…I'm actually pretty good! And that was months ago! I bet I'm ever better now!" I suppose the way I moved past it was to just bite the bullet and say to myself, "Alright, this is the only way I'm going to get better.  Besides, there's nobody else in the room watching this, so who cares anyway?"

What effect does perfectionism have on that fear? What are some ideas for countering it?

I live by the adage, "Success is not perfection." In fact, one of my books has like 6 typos in it! But I found a way to use those mistakes as marketing tools, in addition to symbolizing my humanness to my readers and audience members.

Do you have any "failure role models?" Who have you seen fail / make a wrong choice / etc. and ultimately come out shining?

Growing up I used to get upset when people would make the wrong choices and end up in better situations that myself.  Then my 10^th grade English teacher quoted me a verse from The Bible: "Let us not be weary in well doing, for in due season we will reap a great harvest if we faint not." In other words, making the wrong choices will always catch up to you in the end.  Suckers.

What ideas do you have to help people learn from failure?

"If you're not failing, you're not trying." That's a great quote I live by.  Not sure who said it, but I try to fail at one thing a month. I keep a list of my failures and go back to it every once in a while to learn. Also, if I feel like everything's been going perfectly, I pray for a failure. Seriously. I welcome screw ups into my life and give thanks for every one of them.

What are some alternate perspectives on failing / being wrong / looking stupid?

In the song "Lose Yourself," Eminem says, "Success is my only mother-f***ing option, failure's not."  I'm not sure if I agree with him, but damn is that a great lyric!

Scott Ginsberg
HELLO, my name is Scott

Failure and the Boogeyman

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Failure is like the boogeyman. They both have the power to incite terror, they both get scarier the more you think about them, and they're both entirely made-up.

I can hear the protests already: "What? Failure's made-up? Tell that to my eighth-grade history teacher!"

Yes, failure is made-up. People invented eighth-grade history, and people invented the possibility of failing eighth-grade history. We invented failure, and then we manifested it everywhere. But it's still fictitious. It's just become a highly realistic fiction.

Human beings are masters at making things up. Look at America, for example. The United States is also entirely made-up. Seriously, it is. We may have buildings and historical documents and border patrols, but the United States is still ultimately just an idea--an idea defended by the most technologically advanced weaponry known to humanity, to be sure, but nonetheless an idea.

Without the idea behind it, the infrastructure of the United States would still exist, but it would exist as parts of Canada, Mexico, France, Great Britain, and who knows what other countries. The tangible pieces would still be there, but they wouldn't be the United States.

That's what failure is too: a powerfully imagined invention of humanity.

Without the idea of failure, there are still things that work and things that don't work, but there is no such thing as failure, per se. Failure is a concept, nothing more.

When we remove the idea of failure from our vocabulary, we're left with an innocuous concept of experimentation and an incredibly sharp learning curve. Life without the idea of failure sounds something like this: "Well, I tried one thing, and it worked just like I expected it to, so that was nice but a little dull. But then I tried something else, and it worked out completely differently than I expected, so finally I knew I was getting somewhere interesting!"

Sounds great, right? So why isn't life like that now? If failure isn't real, than why do we believe in it?

We believe in it for the same reason we believe in America: we are taught to infuse our tangible reality with various unquestionable ideas--like seeing buildings and people and being told that this is "America"--and eventually we forget that the idea and the tangible reality underneath are two different things.

So what we think about our reality becomes our reality, and most of what we think about comes down to what we keep track of and how we keep track of it. In America, we keep track of population size, political boundaries, production levels, congressional legislation, market trends, and so on. These are the facts and figures that manifest the idea of America into reality.

In the case of failure, the tracking usually starts in school. For most people, life before school is just a series of interesting experiences. Then suddenly people start writing stuff down and sending home report cards. There aren't any more chances to start each day fresh. What happened yesterday is now a part of our "permanent record."

Even people who weren't present at the time can look up that record and see the complexity of our human experience summed up in a single letter, 'A' through 'F'. Our "performance" is suddenly measured, judged, and carried with us through time and space. After kindergarten, the past becomes our living present.

We know from more enlightened teachings that we should let go of the past, and yet we have created a world in which the past is permanently on file. If we want to stop believing in failure, we have to reimagine the world that has created it.

"Tests," for example, should be about learning, not about judging. Imagine a school system that allowed children to take as many tests as he or she needed until that child had grasped the concepts well enough to score perfectly. Then every score written down would be an "A," and every child would be prepared for the material that came next. The possibility of failure would not exist.

The only reason "failure" exists is because we limit our chances of success. Imagine what our world would look like if we all stopped doing that!

What if every aspiring writer gave themselves as many submissions as they needed to get published and only kept track of the "yes" letters? What if every aspiring actor gave themselves as many auditions as they needed to get cast in a show? What if every entrepreneur gave themselves as many chances as they needed to hit on the right formula for success?

Well, we'd have a world full of people as successful as J. K. Rowling, Johnny Depp, and Bill Gates, that's what. We'd probably also have solar-powered hover cars, desert agriculture, and a cure for every form of cancer on the planet. Every modern invention, from the light bulb to the airplane, came out of a whole lot of trying.

Imagine now where your own life would be if from this day forward you never once chose to limit your chances of success. Imagine what you would be doing today if you didn't believe in failure.

I'm not talking about quitting your day job tomorrow and risking your family's home on nothing but a bright idea. That definitely leaves the door open for "failure." We live in a world of banks, investment firms, credit card companies, and government agencies that all believe in failure, which is a big part of what turns the mere concept of failure into a tangible possibility.

No, I'm talking about giving yourself as many chances as you need to succeed, without making a mental report card out of the attempts that don't work. Learn from them so you can try something else, but don't keep score. Don't let them mean that you've failed.

Suddenly, you can separate the faulty idea from the perfect reality. The learning process still exists, but there's no such thing as "failure." And worrying about it seems as silly as worrying about the boogeyman.

That's the beauty of imaginary things: if you stop believing in them, they really don't exist anymore.

EM Sky--on Business, Life, and Society for the Whole Human Being
 

What Will You Regret When You're 80?

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When I was young, my mother worked as an aide in a nursing home. On weekends that she worked a shorter shift, I went to work with her and spent hours visiting with the residents. Sitting with these remarkable people -- all in their 70s, 80s, and 90s -- I was captivated by their stories. In time, I saw a common thread -- regret. Regret over not doing something they wanted to do but didn't because they were afraid of going broke, being ostracized, failing publicly.

The regrets of the women haunted me most. "If I'd been young in different times, I wouldn't have gotten married so young." "If the times had been different, I would have worked for a few years before my husband and I had kids." "If I'd been braver, I would have gone to college even though that wasn't what girls did back then." "I should have gone to college when the kids grew up, but I thought people would think it silly that a middle-aged woman was starting college." They seemed to envy my education -- and my freedom. Their words followed me everywhere I went and in everything I did. The regrets of old women are impossible to forget.

My junior year in college, I decided I wanted to go to graduate school for journalism or publishing. I loved writing and dreamed of spending my life writing professionally and teaching. A Master's degree would serve both ends. Throughout college, my professors told me that my writing and editing skills were more than good enough to get me into the best schools. I didn't believe them. Couldn't believe them. Didn't think a good performer in a really small state school could compete with the best of the best. I was afraid to apply to the school I really wanted to attend -- the best journalism program in the country -- because I was afraid I'd learn I wasn't good enough at the one thing I loved to do. One of my classmates, an ex-Marine and a talented writer in his own right, once told me that he thought my talent was only exceeded by my fear. I'm still not sure about the talent part, but he was right about the fear. 

I applied to several programs, was accepted by all of them, and settled on one out west, convincing myself it would give me what I wanted. My professors and family repeatedly pushed me to apply to that other school, and were mystified that I didn't. When I headed west, I left behind the catalogs, brochures, and notes from my discussions with people at that other school, which were dog-eared, marked up, and pockmarked by hands that had clenched longingly at them.

Three days into my first semester, things fell apart. I discovered how redundant the coursework was going to be, that the very courses I was counting on to make the Master's program different from my undergraduate studies had been sacrificed on the altar of two-year budget freezes. Learned that the admissions advisor had known about this and didn't tell me because his only interest was getting bodies into the program. On Day 4, I withdrew and started packing.

While I packed, I realized that if I didn't get past my fear, this was something I would mourn when I was 80. I called the admissions advisor at the University of Missouri-Columbia journalism school and talked with her for 45 minutes. We worked out an arrangement in which my application package for winter admission needed to be in the following Wednesday (giving me Labor Day weekend to write my essays). As I left town Tuesday morning, I dropped the package into FedEx Overnight; my package and recommendation letters arrived in Missouri on Wednesday, and I arrived for my interview and tour on Thursday. Seeing the campus and meeting the people made me want to go all that much more and the fear increased proportionately. I was a basketcase while I awaited the arrival of what I was sure would be a rejection letter.

Six weeks later, the admissions advisor called me. "I put your letter in the mail, but thought I needed to call you and tell you that you've been accepted. The admissions review confirmed what I'd been telling you all along...your grades, test scores, writing clips, internships, desire, everything, was more than enough to get you in." If I hadn't been so stunned, I would have been profoundly angry with myself for letting fear overtake me.

Four months later, I loaded up my small car and headed west again, driving through a blizzard to reach campus in time for the start of classes. My two years at Missouri were pivotal for me, and nearly every week I had some experience that made me pause and think, "If I'd stayed scared, I would have missed this."

I made sure I remembered the stomach-twisting, head-throbbing, chest-tightening sadness I'd felt when I thought I'd miss out on Missouri, and have used it as my barometer ever since. When the fear is high, this sadness always tells me when the desire and the stakes are even higher, when bypassing today's dream will haunt me when I'm 80.

What will haunt you?

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Whitney Potsus

Tough Love

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If the world were perfect nothing would happen.  We would be complete inactive creatures.  We would still be all monkeys sitting in trees with no use to invent tools.  Further back still, evolution wouldn't occur because life would never have started.  The fact that it did, although a miracle,  was a fluke.  I believe contrary to the Garden of Eve, If the world was perfect, it wouldn't exist at all.

Accidents do happen.  Accidents will happen.  Accidents need to happen.   Without them there would be no need for solutions.  Chaos needs to reign to improve.  So to people who think they themselves as "perfectionists". I give you the best phrase tough love can give. Get over it.   

No matter how hard you struggle, no matter the best laid plans at some point in your life you will fail; at some point in life you will look like an idiot. It's supposed to happen.  It's a lesson of being human. It's a lesson that you need improvement, which is true. For some this sense of inevitability is enough.  Like death an taxes one must simply carry on.  Carpe Diem.  Once a year,  do your taxes.  This constant gives the courage to throw a sock out of place, maybe tilt the lamp shade a bit.

However, I know that some of you will not let go.  You hold near and dear to your ideals.  You wade through the chaotic tides of dealing with lazy people, nerve wracking traffic jams,  rains storms that ruin outdoor plans.  And through it all you create a beautiful bubble of your perfectionism.  Now take a moment and look around your bubble.  How many people are in it with you?  I even bet that some of your aren't even in your bubble.  I ask,  why is that?

To move away from proving the need for accident or spontaneity or looking like a fool,  I will endeavor to appeal to the wonders that come out of if. Everyone knows about 3M's Stick-It notes. The glue that wouldn't glue.  Recipes are made as a mistake.  Inventions are created from accident.   And what about the art.  As a Jazz musician if there were no accidents,  there would be no really cool music.  Take a listen to Ella Fitzgeralds wimsical version of "Mack The Knife". Art is full of beautiful mistakes.  As a reflection of that lessons, we even have wise words "art imitates life".  I say in a perfect world abstract art wouldn't exists.  If no one ever tripped onto a pie, no one would laugh,  and no one would understand slapstick humour. 

To me, perfectionism is control.  It's a bubble.  So,  I'm sorry you perfectionists.  I'm sorry to those who make sure not to look like a fool or to make a mistake.  My goal is to burst your bubble and have you take in a big breath of polluted air.  Death comes knocking. The Tax man will come to audit.  And whether you like it or not, whether you do anything or not,  a butterfly will flap it's wing and Chaos will breeze into your window.

by Nick Kempinski

Fear Failure? Fail Faster!!!

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This month's topic on fear has gripped me, on more than one occasion. It's gripped me hard in the past and prevented me from taking risks that could have helped me do more.

For instance...

I could have stayed in the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid-90s and gotten a job at one of the dot-coms...Had I not been afraid computers were just a passing fad and that BBSs were just for porn junkies. I was working on computers before PCs were available for us all. Drats!

I could have been a successful real estate investor in Milwaukee in the late 90s...Had I not been afraid that the big city of Milwaukee was so scary. The real estate market in Milwaukee shows my old house that I paid $50,800 for in 1996 would be worth well over $100,000 as of the city's assessment for 2006, but I let it go for a song in 1998.

I could have been a successful teacher in the early 21st century...Had I not been afraid of who knows what. I was just 3 semesters from graduating, and I stopped going to school. I just decided I didn't want to go to school, I didn't want to get a degree, so I went to work at (where else?) an Internet Service Provider to play with computers again, just as the tech market was bottoming out.

So what do I regret most and what did I learn from the past? I regret letting FEAR grip my life, and not taking the chance on something that could have been great for me, or at the very worst, could have provided something for me to learn some great lessons from.

I learned that even if I failed, I would still be learning something, and that looking back at my past is no way to live.

So how do I live now? I TAKE THE SHOT! I got married to a great gal in 2002, I started blogging over at Make It Great!, and now, I've published my first book. Whether it succeeds or not doesn't matter. What matters is I took the shot, and I'm going to keep taking shots.

I'm going to FAIL FASTER until I figure out what I want to do, and I realize that even when I figure it out, I'm going to FAIL SOME MORE! And that's okay with me, because I'd rather try and fail than never try at all.

And if you surround yourself with GREAT people, they'll help pick you up when you fail and help you get back on the horse. You can watch me riding this horse I got back up on here. Really!

Phil Gerbyshak


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