Thursday, September 10, 2009

Failure

It just hit me now that it's better to fail than to succeed. It's even better not to try your hardest to succeed in everything new that you encounter. It's best to accept that your trials will lead you to failure.

It's nothing groundbreaking to say that failure can lead you to success, but the way in which it hit me was rather interesting. I thought about when I tried playing games on the computer, and I really am not that good at games, but whenever I start playing them, I try my absolute best not to deviate from what I perceive is the best way not to lose. In my first efforts I manage to do better than most, but as time progresses, I don't improve much. Sometimes it's because even though I've perfected what I aim to do, it's not the best way to do things.

There are others who don't care so much to do things right the first time round, they try different things and fail in so many ways, but what they end up doing is having more experience and really grasping how to work through a situation where they failed. In the end they end up succeeding in exploring more details of wins and losses than I encountered. They will probably be much more skilled than I am at playing the game.

When we aim to succeed we don't see that our perceptions are the boundaries of our success. When we don't explore the things that could have worked better than our perception. We base our vision of success on the past, that's the only way we plan for the future, but what if the future isn't a lot like the past? Logic cannot replace experience completely since there will always be something new to experience. Experience is what can give you better logic in the future. Failing is what gives people experience. Any professional at any job is one who understands what to do in difficult situations either because he tried and failed or tried and succeeded.

Honestly I was only thinking about playing computer games, about how skill is built based on failures and tough situations. But with games you get many spare lives I suppose, when you're doing something in real life, you don't have that many lives to spare. Still, there's something appealing about failure, for personal experiences it outlives success.

No comments: