When challenging yourself, you will experience failures. To those able to heed its lessons, failure is an exacting but prodigious teacher; its lessons bring us farther along ours paths to mastery. So when you challenge yourself and fail, congratulations on the lesson!

<aside> 💡 A healthy attitude towards failure unlocks the upper bounds of achievement.

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For me, and I imagine I'm not at all unique in this, it isn't usually helpful to try to convince myself that I won't fail at an endeavor when facing down growth discomfort because that just doesn't gel with reality. Even with preparation, some lessons just have to be learned through trial and error. Rather, it is more reassuring to remember that yes, I will likely make an abundance of mistakes - and that's just how growth works! That reframing helps me to shift my focus away from avoiding mistakes all together (which can be achieved by simply not trying), focusing instead on making sure that they aren’t catastrophic when they do occur (through preparation) and that I learn as much as I can from them (through retrospection).

In other words, accepting the inevitability of mistakes, a form of failure, helps to build the courage to make the right mistakes necessary to achieve challenging goals.

I'll share two quotes that have resonated with me in moments when I've needed to summon the courage to take on or face challenges. Despite being uttered centuries apart - one being from a contemporary science fiction novel, the other from a historic military leader - there is a kernel of insight that connects them.

The first is,

"Life is like walking along a long road shouldering a heavy load; there is no need to hurry. One who treats difficulties as the normal state of affairs will never be discontented. Patience is the source of eternal peace; treat anger as an enemy. Harm will befall one who knows only success and has never experienced failure. Blame yourself rather than others. It is better not to reach than to go too far."

– Testament of Ieyasu, 1604

And the other, which resonates with management or having responsibility for others but applies to individual endeavors as well, is

You will fail. And when you do, you must do everything you can to fail as little as possible. Don’t let the failure get it’s teeth into you. You’ll make decisions that come with a cost. That is Command. Do not let the cost consume you "

– Child of Memory, Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2023