Take your temperature

# Chapter 70

If you want to make, do, or create something then failures or mistakes are part of your normative experiences. Get used to it. So much energy and bandwidth gets wasted on trying to avoid mistakes and failures that a great deal of forward progress is eclipsed. Again we are talking about “failure” not in the competitive trauma sort of way that many Americans do, but in the make a wrong choice, choose the less than ideal path, experimentation, prototyping kind of “failure”. The learning kind of failure, that teaches you something, even if it is negative, so that your next attempt can be better, smarter, moving the ball forward in a positive direction.

Whew! Even trying to find neutral language to describe this is challenging as I see that I used the words negative and positive in the previous sentence. This is not helpful because the entire point of this chapter is to help you see and feel failure and mistakes as a normative learning experiences for those in a typical development trajectory. Like last night, my grandson’s soccer team lost 0-3 to a superior opponent. The team they were playing was far better coached, and executed the basics of the game in every way in every play. Jonathan’s team executed the basic fundamentals about 25-33% of the time. It was a very instructive time for the team if they can choose to see it and understand it to be so. If they simply flip it off as a “loss” then they have squandered this wonderful gift they have been given. The opportunity is to learn. So to take your temperature this morning, what are you learning?