Is there anything more formidable than a blinking cursor on a blank page? That vertical line flashing hypnotically, goading me like a metronome into madness. Since starting my Substack, I’ve been fortunate, and my content has flowed freely enough. But today, the words are stuck somewhere between my brain and my fingertips, and my thoughts aren’t as tangible as I’d like them to be. The bare page feels huge, and my inner critic, unforgiving. For hours I’ve been staring at my screen, pondering Schrödinger’s cat as I wrestle with the first word. This could be the best Substack I’ve ever written, it could also be the worst, or anything in between. But until I write something, it’s all of the above and none of them at the same time.
There was a time when I would have been comfortable with that resolution and put my laptop away. If we are all being honest, we can all hold our hands up to that way of thinking from time to time, and why not? I don’t think there’s any shame in it. If you put something out there, you may very well succeed, but you can also fail. Who wouldn’t want to protect themselves from failing?
Weirdly enough, I think I’m more afraid of success than I am of failure. But that’s because I’ve failed a lot, whereas I don’t feel as though I’ve done much in the way of succeeding. I know that sounds harsh, and I’m not trying to beat myself up here. I just honestly don’t feel as though I have succeeded in the way I want to succeed, the way I know in my heart that I can succeed—yet!
Is it possible to go through life without failing, I wonder? With enough effort, perhaps you could reach old age having never known the bitter taste of failure. Personally, I think it may be one of the very few unattainable things in life, but who knows! Nothing is impossible these days. I think you would be among an elite percentage of non-failing fellows, though.
But if you spend your energy and personal resources avoiding failure, how are you learning? As the saying goes, risk nothing, gain nothing. Here’s the thing about fearing failure: it gets easier the more you do it. The more you do it, the less it happens.
You can’t rewrite a blank page, but you can improve upon a thousand misspelled words. Which is why I’ve spent the last hour hammering my keyboard, writing about how I have nothing to write, and now I’m about five hundred words into what I believe is a pretty interesting Substack.
If I were to do my best to summarise this arbitrary Sunday ramble: Failure is a necessary, part of life and an essential part of the human condition. Without failure, we don’t grow, learn, or excel. We all become paralysed when confronted with a blank page, but it’s only a blank page until you write the first word, it’s no different in life. So many of us choose the safety of inaction over the risk of failure. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Put simply, if you keep throwing a dart at a dartboard, eventually, you will hit a bullseye. The first time might be a fluke, but if you block out the jeers from the crowd and apply enough consistency, those bullseyes will start to come easy.
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until next time
DB
loved reading this!!!
I listened to a podcast with Alain de Botton today and on this topic, he said "if you're not embarrassed by at least 15 things you did last year, you're not learning enough" and this really reminded me of that - how can you know what 'success' looks like unless you've seen 'failure'.?!