My whole life has been focused on being afraid of a whole mess of things. Needles, commitment, geese (it is an unhealthy hatred/fear) just to name a few of them. But the one that has held me back in most (probably all) aspects of my life is the fear of failure. Failure was a creeping disease I was told to avoid, it was something that would destroy me if I let it catch me off step. That is how I lived my life, afraid and holding back because I didn’t want to be considered worthless by anyone around me. But I am slowly starting to realize that fear is something greater, something that factors (heeheehee fear factor) into life as an intricate and very human way of pushing us onward to new frontiers. Failure is a chance to take an introspective look at who we are and what our true values and self-worth really are. To be clear, humans are a species that thrive on failure, where we use these moments of setbacks to advance in all aspects of life, from science to love.
When I was growing up fear was beaten into me (not literally, my parents were great people) by the media and pop culture I was consuming every second. In school we were told that failure was terrible and would not be permitted because it was impossible to learn in class if we did. I created a beaten loop in my mind, a million different ways to say that I didn’t want to fail. This caused me to become complacent with my standing in life, not wanting to change who I was or where I was going (the answer was nowhere, I was going nowhere). The small choices in my life were not fraught with adventure, I ate the same things, talked to the same people and got mad over not getting to play the same sick bass line in the songs my old band was writing. But the biggest part where I was afraid to fail was the future.
If you had asked me 5 years ago what I wanted to do with my life I would not have been able to tell you. I didn’t even have a path picked out that seemed likely. Maybe live in my parent’s basement, being a lazy bum. Thankfully however, I decided to take the ‘safe’ (look up the fast facts about welders and health problems… I’ll wait. Not so safe now eh?) route and get a job as a welder, because they pay was good (show me the mon-ay!). I couldn’t fail at this! It was simple, easy, I mean I can screw two pieces of wood together, what so different about some metal on metal action. (Don’t give me that look) After graduation from high school I had to wait 6 months before I started community college and then I had to wait another 6 months to enter the program. I had a great time hanging with those men while I did. We burned things, melted face masks, some of them got drunk before class started on Fridays (ahhhh good times, good times). And I learned very valuable lessons in life, like how to tack things together, how to measure, cut along with all different parts of the fabrication process. But as the semester started to draw to a middle something absolutely terrible happened. I was miserable at welding.
Well not terrible just not great, or really good. I realized that I was not going to be a field welder, at best I was a person who would be working on an assembly line repeating the same motion day in, day out. I knew that this was not what I wanted, it sounded boring and terrible (no offense factory worker reading this, I respect the crap out of you), no matter how much money I could be lining my pockets with (median as of Oct 2016 was roughly $36,000). I had two real options in my lap, one was continuing on, not admitting failure or admit it, take a risk and hopefully find something I was better suited for. (From here we speed the story up, no point in continuing, I will write more about this part of the story later.) Moving from Milford campus back to Lincoln campus and back into the basement I continued my education. Graduating with distinction of not actually dying in some form while I was attending school is a pretty large win for me. And each day that I wake up (not afternoon oddly enough) I am happier now than I was welding. I haven’t found my ‘perfect’ career yet, but I am always trying to take something positive away from each new failure. When it came to welding I understood there are some walls that shouldn’t be scaled because even if we push forward, we may lose ourselves in the process. What I want to aim for now is success, not just failing to fail. This is what has plagued me, keeping me up for at all hours in the evening. Going over past failure, over-analyzing how they are hurting me at that moment (they aren’t), is par for the course on any given night.
Each day I struggle with my fear, trying to not let it get the better of me. There are many days that I lose the fight, letting my old, worn-in habits hold me in place, while other days I am able to make small steps forward and improve who I am as a person. If I had failed to fail, I would still be in Lincoln, trying to be a welder (seriously, it would have been like a terrible version of a Michael Bay rip-off), instead of trying to survive down in Kansas City, learning new things every day. Now I am striving for that success to improve my lot in life, not maintain what seems comfortable. What I am calling for today isn’t for you to fail at everything that you do. I am not asking for you to really bear down, bite the bullet and admit failure in all aspects of life. I want you to simply question where should you accept failure and learn. Don’t live in fear of it like I did.
When I was growing up fear was beaten into me (not literally, my parents were great people) by the media and pop culture I was consuming every second. In school we were told that failure was terrible and would not be permitted because it was impossible to learn in class if we did. I created a beaten loop in my mind, a million different ways to say that I didn’t want to fail. This caused me to become complacent with my standing in life, not wanting to change who I was or where I was going (the answer was nowhere, I was going nowhere). The small choices in my life were not fraught with adventure, I ate the same things, talked to the same people and got mad over not getting to play the same sick bass line in the songs my old band was writing. But the biggest part where I was afraid to fail was the future.
If you had asked me 5 years ago what I wanted to do with my life I would not have been able to tell you. I didn’t even have a path picked out that seemed likely. Maybe live in my parent’s basement, being a lazy bum. Thankfully however, I decided to take the ‘safe’ (look up the fast facts about welders and health problems… I’ll wait. Not so safe now eh?) route and get a job as a welder, because they pay was good (show me the mon-ay!). I couldn’t fail at this! It was simple, easy, I mean I can screw two pieces of wood together, what so different about some metal on metal action. (Don’t give me that look) After graduation from high school I had to wait 6 months before I started community college and then I had to wait another 6 months to enter the program. I had a great time hanging with those men while I did. We burned things, melted face masks, some of them got drunk before class started on Fridays (ahhhh good times, good times). And I learned very valuable lessons in life, like how to tack things together, how to measure, cut along with all different parts of the fabrication process. But as the semester started to draw to a middle something absolutely terrible happened. I was miserable at welding.
Well not terrible just not great, or really good. I realized that I was not going to be a field welder, at best I was a person who would be working on an assembly line repeating the same motion day in, day out. I knew that this was not what I wanted, it sounded boring and terrible (no offense factory worker reading this, I respect the crap out of you), no matter how much money I could be lining my pockets with (median as of Oct 2016 was roughly $36,000). I had two real options in my lap, one was continuing on, not admitting failure or admit it, take a risk and hopefully find something I was better suited for. (From here we speed the story up, no point in continuing, I will write more about this part of the story later.) Moving from Milford campus back to Lincoln campus and back into the basement I continued my education. Graduating with distinction of not actually dying in some form while I was attending school is a pretty large win for me. And each day that I wake up (not afternoon oddly enough) I am happier now than I was welding. I haven’t found my ‘perfect’ career yet, but I am always trying to take something positive away from each new failure. When it came to welding I understood there are some walls that shouldn’t be scaled because even if we push forward, we may lose ourselves in the process. What I want to aim for now is success, not just failing to fail. This is what has plagued me, keeping me up for at all hours in the evening. Going over past failure, over-analyzing how they are hurting me at that moment (they aren’t), is par for the course on any given night.
Each day I struggle with my fear, trying to not let it get the better of me. There are many days that I lose the fight, letting my old, worn-in habits hold me in place, while other days I am able to make small steps forward and improve who I am as a person. If I had failed to fail, I would still be in Lincoln, trying to be a welder (seriously, it would have been like a terrible version of a Michael Bay rip-off), instead of trying to survive down in Kansas City, learning new things every day. Now I am striving for that success to improve my lot in life, not maintain what seems comfortable. What I am calling for today isn’t for you to fail at everything that you do. I am not asking for you to really bear down, bite the bullet and admit failure in all aspects of life. I want you to simply question where should you accept failure and learn. Don’t live in fear of it like I did.