Fear of failure

Dear Friends, I recently had a consultation with a young man who was struggling with a fear of failure. His wife was frustrated with him as he was always starting new projects and ventures but never seeing them through, because once he started, he became paralyzed with fear that he would fail. I could sympathize with this anxiety about failure. In my experience, it is quite common to be worried about failure and the idea of disappointing others, so it helps to address it. I have another friend named Rabi, who has developed a great secret of mastering failure. Rabi thinks it is impossible to fail. "You can't even call it bad decision-making. You make a decision, evaluate it based on what happens, and then make another decision based on the results. If something doesn't work out, you learn as much as you can from it and either find a better way to do it or do something else. That is all you can do." In Rabi's theory, there are two ways to proceed in the face of failure. Either allow the negative results of your decisions (your "failures") to knock you down and keep you from trying anything new, or you begin to count your failures as successes. If you think about it, it makes perfect sense to look at the plans that don't work as a positive, because they usually direct us off in another direction. And there is always the possibility that the new direction will provide the results we are seeking. When I shared Rabi’s wisdom with my young client and his wife, he was skeptical but agreed to try sticking to a path long enough to find out if it would work for him or not. I heard from his wife later that he had taken the advice to heart and followed through on his next business venture. That one failed, but the circumstances around that initial failure led to his meeting a person who had the answer he needed to help him to succeed. She reported that he was now in a new business venture and he was excited, focused and happy that he had stuck with advice. Behind every failure is the potential for success, and if we give up too soon, we may never know what wonderful thing we could have accomplished. Friends, there is a story involving Edison, which illustrates this point perfectly. At one point Thomas Edison was supposedly asked by a reporter how it felt to have experienced 1,000 failures in inventing his light bulb, and the inventor allegedly replied, "I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to NOT make a light bulb." Can you imagine what life might be like if Edison had given up on the first try?