Learn To Fail

I read a lot. When I get hooked on a particular subject I’ll come home from the library with stacks of books and read all of them before going back for more. I usually cover the entire section in the library before I’m finished with a topic. When I wanted to learn how to get organized I read every book I could find about the subject. When I was pregnant it was baby names and parenting books.

Lately I’ve been interested in books about learning and teaching. I’m looking for ideas I can use while home-schooling my kids. An interesting idea that has come up in several books I’ve read is the idea of giving your kids a lot of safe opportunities to fail. If they learn while they're young that failure isn't the end of the story, it's only the beginning, they can go on to do great things.

Small children aren’t afraid of failure. I watched Kate try for months to do a walk-over. She didn’t care how many times she had to fall on her head. Quitting was not an option and she was going to keep trying until she learned it. At her final moment of success she looked as if she had conquered the world!

Somehow as we leave our childhood most of us begin to fear failure a little bit, or a lot. I say things I later regret so maybe I should just keep my mouth shut from now on. I spend hours on projects only to have them turn out so ugly that I want to hide them in a closet. I forget appointments and lose things and someone will say, “I thought you were supposed to be so organized.”

Let’s face it, learning can hurt and opportunities to fail never go away. But it’s that little bit of pain that comes with every failure that drives us to try harder. It’s those tiny bits of progress that makes us realize it’s not hopeless so we keep at it until we’re finally rewarded with success. I am learning to be less and less afraid of all those mistakes. I look at them as practice for the good things in my life. Every failure was worth it because every once in a while I say something brilliant, I make something beautiful and I find something exactly where I thought it would be!