I had coffee with a friend today & he said one of his goals this year is to fail publicly, not just privately. Failing privately is failing because of not executing the ideas, not trying, not putting the work out there. Failing publicly is putting the work out there and having it fall flat, or being criticized, or ridiculed. His desire to fail publicly resonated with me. I’ve been making notes of ideas, writing stories in my head and writing down parts of stories or essays with this medium in mind, yet I haven’t posted. I’ve been putting off the full execution until I have more time, until I have better clarity for why I’m writing a piece, until I figure out exactly where I’m going with this website, until there’s time to do better, more complete edits on my writing…basically, I’ve been making a lot of excuses.
While waiting for the right time and the opportunity to create the allusive and, if I’m honest with myself, nonexistent Perfect pieces, I’ve denied myself the opportunity to learn through doing, forgetting that not doing is also failure, and of the two types of failure, not doing is a worse failure than failing while trying.
So, here’s to failing publicly … to picking up my writing and storytelling again after too long a hiatus, to hoping that through the process of writing and posting I may fail publicly forward towards learning and deeper understanding, forward on this path wherever it leads.
