“You don’t learn from successes; you don’t learn from awards; you don’t learn from celebrity; you only learn from wounds and scars and mistakes and failures. And that’s the truth.” – Jane Fonda
When picking whether to pursue a new path do you worry about whether you will fail? Of course, you do! But does that stop you from trying? If so, please reconsider how you look at the term “failure.”
Failure is a maligned term. The cultural obsession with success has caused serious harm and a lack of diverse experiences. If you only concentrate on what you are good at, it limits you to a single set of skills. Trying new things requires you to risk the possibility of not liking something or not being good at it. As we all know, we do not wake up knowing how to do something new. Learning anything requires time, focus, and patience. It also requires humility and willing partners. Algorithms and AI will enhance these problems since they are programmed with inherent biases and suggest similarities rather than looking for differences and new pathways. We need to be looking for opportunities to ‘fail’ so we can continue learning!
Learning how to weigh the risks and calculate the benefits is something that can be trained. It just takes practice, a process for evaluation and decision-making, and an open mind that will take you out of your comfort zone and possibly into a new adventure!