This is just about the most important lesson I’ve learned this year: fail to success. That’s Dean Wesley Smith’s way of putting it, but it’s another spin on the old saying, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss you’ll land among the stars.”
Way back when, when my son had just been born and I was in the throes of postnatal depression, writing became just another yardstick of failure in my life. If I didn’t meet my quota of words for the day, if I fell behind, if – Heaven forbid – I had a day without any writing because I had a newborn, I was a failure.
It was poisonous, a toxic way to work, or even live, and it led to me quitting writing. It wasn’t until I found a way to take the pressure off that I was able to return – but to do that, I needed to quit cold-turkey. Not take a break, not have a rest for a while, but actually, completely quit, with the knowledge that I might not ever return. It was scary. And it was liberating.
And so. Writing has never again become a yardstick of failure, which is great – but learning from Dean Wesley Smith a lot in the last 12 months has done wonders for my mindset beyond just ‘not being a failure’. Dean is known for setting ridiculously absurd challenges for himself – and mostly, for hitting them. But sometimes, he does fail, because that’s life. The great thing I have learned from watching Dean do this, though, is that he always picks himself up, dusts himself off, takes stock of what he did achieve, takes a moment to celebrate that, and then moves on to the next challenge.
Because here’s the thing: if you set tiny goals for yourself and fail to achieve them, you’ve basically done nothing. But if you set outrageous goals for yourself and flunk out partway through, most of the time you’ve still done more than you would have if you’d just set the tiny goal to begin with.
The trick is learning to celebrate what you did achieve, rather than focusing on what you failed to achieve. And that’s a hard trick.
It’s hard, but I’m slowly, slowly getting better at it, and combined with some excellent heart-to-hearts at the Masterclass last week with a variety of amazing people, I am slowly learning to find the middle ground between outrageous expectations for myself, focusing on small wins instead of failures, and not killing myself in the process.
So here’s the to the stars in our lives: they may not be the moon we wanted, but they are glorious and glittery and beautiful and wild in their own right – and they are still beyond the confines of our earthly atmosphere.
(And yes, I know that technically the stars are actually *further* away than the moon, and *more* massive and glorious, but it’s a metaphor damn it, don’t @ me – and also, you know what? Sometimes what we end up with because we missed what we were aiming for IS bigger and better and brighter.)
