“We live in a society in which we are terrified to fail… and it is killing us.” – Dr. Leonard Wisneski, Interim Director of the Integrative Health Policy Consortium.

Our fear of failure is harmful.  Even deadly. We are stressing ourselves to the point of creating significant health issues – depression, anxiety, heart disease, obesity.  And we are raising generations of children who are so used to succeeding in everything they do, that they melt down at the possibility of not succeeding.

“Fail often, fail early, fail cheaply.”  – Seth Godin, 18-time bestselling author & business/success guru.  

Also from Seth:

The person who fails the most will win. If I fail more than you do, I will win. Because in order to keep failing, you’ve got to be good enough to keep playing.

So, if you fail cataclysmically and never play again, you only fail once. But if you are always there shipping, putting your work into the world, creating and starting things, you will learn endless things.

You will learn to see more accurately, you will learn the difference between a good idea and a bad idea and, most of all, you will keep producing.

And one more bit on failure from one of my favorite author/cartoonists, Hugh Macleod: “A lot of bad ideas have to die in order for the good ones to live.”  You have to have a lot of ideas – many that fail, before you have a good one that succeeds.

It’s OK to fail – we should fail more often, because it means we are trying.  It’s easy to give up and not try for fear of failure, but there is meaning to be discovered in trying and failing, in learning from failure and trying again.  

Go out and fail.  Fail a few times. Fail a bunch of times.  Because it’s from that failure that you will learn to succeed.

If you’re interested, someday I’ll tell you about my biggest failure – my “$1,000,000 Failure”, as I call it.  (It was actually closer to $995,000…) And why now, today, looking back, it was one of the best, if not most expensive, lessons I’ve ever learned in life.