I've seen a lot of minnows joining us at the @minnowsupport project, go through the sign up process, make one post, and then promptly throw their hands up in frustration. I never see them again, so distraught are they that the free steemit money didn't wash over them instantly.
To put it bluntly, they failed. No real value is created in your one post about Malaysian basket weaving or the lost intricacies of the underground corn trade.
Failure is what many of us live in fear of our whole lives. Fear that what we make won’t be any good. Fear that even if it is good, no one will care. Or even worse, WE won’t care about it ourselves.
Despite the amount of fear and power that failure wields over us, it has surprisingly blunt teeth. when failure comes, rarely does it come with a serious impact beyond our own fabricated guilt. We fear that the world will crash on us and we will be punished for our lack of success, yet when the day comes, not much changes.
In fact, case in point: I was writing three times every week, and then I stopped. I haven't written in months. I anguished over this. I beat myself up, and even used the words “a useless garbage person” to describe how I felt about myself to my wife. Yet, here I am. No real change. No one chastising me except myself.
“She’s torn up plenty, but she’ll fly true.” — Zoe Washburne
And that’s about the way it goes most of the time. I set a goal. I do well at it for a bit, and I stop. I see this stopping as a failure, murder myself about the obviously intense pain I deserve for this failure, and that crushing guilt stops me from even trying again. I think this is true for many out there who strive to improve, create, or share themselves in an honest way: for the artist.
What this article proves is that the only way to fail is to stop doing whatever it is that you were trying. I stopped. Now I start again, months late but still flying.
Failure is stopping.
Just restart. Let every day be a great time to start again.
As long as you can drag yourself back, you win.
As long as you can stop punishing yourself for imagined deadlines, you win.
As long as you can realize that failure is just a empty way to refer to our own fear, you win.
So get winning.
