It starts young. Your world is
sprawling, endless, and dizzying. You
will learn to stand. You will try, and fail.
You learn to walk. This path is muddied, trampled over, but you're greeted by
ambition. Someone else has walked here
before, and it’s this familiarity you keep
holding onto; this path can only lead to
one destination.
As a young boy, I held onto this promise. The road winds, and winds. You’re
playing a game that has long been mastered by those who came before you.
You're at an obvious disadvantage, but
you keep pushing. It starts young. You're
set up to fail.
They've drawn a map to success. As if
it's a static, still destination. One step after another, two, three.
This experience has been flattened
into a reel, into a script. It’s a sign of life,
but your pace cannot match the speed of
this way forward. You stumble, limp, and
blood pools in your shoe. You don't stop.
The first time I’d slowed down was
right after college. My friends had long
outpaced me. They'd filled out shoes bigger than theirs. At once, every little map
has collapsed into one. The way
forward.
At once, you realise, it
isn't enough.
You did everything right, and yet, it
didn't guarantee success. No matter how
well you followed the map, you end up lost
anyway.
In the years since, the dust has settled.
Slow and steady, you look back at a memory with new, bleary eyes. Slow and steady, a
recognition has taken home in your bones.
Between your ribs. I’ve lived most of my
life learning to avoid failure. Not succeed.
I've chosen the path with the least resistance. I’ve chosen a promise. I've chosen
evidence.
Failure echoes; nimble, glassy, quiet.
The space between what was promised
and where you arrive. We choose to fill this
space with shame.
BUT TO REDEFINE FAILURE, YOU MUST
REDEFINE SUCCESS.
What does success mean to you, and in
context of it, what does failure mean? Success and failure are answers to a tangible
goal. Once the goal shifts, the meaning dissolves. So does shame.
Why don't we chase failure? Why isn't
the goal to fail, to experience, to learn? If
the goal is to fail, will you go out of your
way to do things you didn't before? When
you were sure you’d fail, so you didn’t even
try—things that seemed too far out, too farfetched, too exposed.
What if, instead, the goal is a thousand
rejections? The fear of failing begins to dissolve — because failing is the point. What
if that was the metric? If the goal was to fail,
would you try harder?
Your world was sprawling, once—you
were just a child, wobbling, reaching,
falling, trying again. You never called it
failure.