Blurt: Fear of Failure

Everyone who has ever tried to do anything has failed at one time or another. It doesn’t matter how talented, wealthy, intelligent, or important a person is, the only way to avoid failure is to hide out in a cave and do nothing. However, I believe it is important to continue to try to achieve your goals. We cannot live in fear saying to ourselves,

“Don’t take a chance or make waves to rock the boat.”
“I better just stay right here and hang onto what I have.”
“I shouldn’t change a thing because there is nothing out there for me anyway.”
“I don’t have what it takes to be successful or to make it.”
“I’ll probably just try and fail and then I’ll be sorry.”
“I’ll just end up wishing I had stayed where I am.”

You may be surprised to learn many successful and influential people have failed before they finally reached their goals or experienced success in their lives.

• Charles Darrow was unemployed before he invented the game of Monopoly. When he introduced his first version of the game to a toy company in 1935, it was rejected saying it contained 52 “fundamental errors.” Today, Parker Brothers prints more than 40 billion dollars of Monopoly money each year which is twice the amount of real money printed by the US Mint.
• Elvis Presley was fired after his first performance at the Grand Ole Opry and was told, “You ain’t going nowhere son.”
• In one of Fred Astaire’s early screen tests he was described as, “Can’t act, Can’t sing, Balding. Can dance a little.”
• One of the famous tenors, Enrico Caruso, was told by his voice teacher that he couldn’t sing at all.
• Albert Einstein was four years old before he could speak and seven before he could read. He didn’t do well in high school and he flunked his college exams being advised by a teacher to drop out and said, “You’ll never amount to anything, Einstein.”
• Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor saying he lacked creativity and good ideas.
• Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, flunked out of college.
• Steven Spielberg dropped out of high school and even though he returned later attending a class for the learning disabled, he dropped out again after only a month.
• Henry Ford barely made it through school.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald flunked out of college.
• Admiral Richard Byrd had been retired from the Navy as “unfit for service” before he flew over both poles.
• Michael Jordon was cut from his high school basketball team.

As for me, I know with my own attempts to lose the weight I have failed numerous times on many different programs but to date I have lost 139 pounds. In the past I would lose for awhile but then I would fall off of my “diet” and regain all of the weight and usually a few pounds on top of what I had originally lost. This is why I believe it is so important to have a mindset this is a lifestyle change and not a “diet.” We must look at our failures as opportunities to do better next time. We must ask ourselves,

“What did I learn from this experience?”
“What will I do the next time to achieve a different outcome?”

“What will my attitude be?” Will I look at my failure and beat myself up smacking my head against the wall. Will I say things like, “How could I be so stupid?” “What a dummy I am! I can’t believe I would be so stupid to let that happen.” “I guess I’ll never amount to anything anyway.” OR Will I look at my failure and try to examine what I did wrong so I can do better next time and succeed. We must be able to say, “I made a mistake. I can’t go back and change what happened. If I could, I would, but I can’t. Here’s how I will handle the situation differently if it happens again based on what I have learned.”

We cannot let the fear of failure rule whether or not to strive to achieve our goals. We must keep pushing forward and realize we will have setbacks. We will fail from time to time. But if we continue to strive and learn from our mistakes we will be successful. I wish you all of the best in achieving your goals. God bless you.

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits that neither enjoy much nor suffer much because they live in that grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt

“God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love and of a sound mind.” 2 Timothy 1:7