When you are doing an activity that requires you to be creative. Avoiding failure is like attempting to go for a swim without getting wet.
Creativity is combining already existing concept and ideas in ways they were never been combined before. As this involves going on new and untested territory your chances to experience what we call failure are simply astronomical.
When you experience a blockage it is not like you can't do that activity at all as much, that your have so high and unreasonable expectations of yourself and you completely eliminated the possibility of failure.
For example if you suffer from writer's block, it is not like you can't write at all as much that you stopped writing for yourself, instead of playing with words and ideas no you are trying to impress others with what you write.
Unfortunately performance it is not such a straightforward process, generally the way it works you have to practice a certain skill for a long time before you can produce anything of value.
So you just write and write and eventually your skills will increase and be able to produce something that you weren't able to do before. It is not necessarily a constant process, sometimes you get worse after you get better, it is persisting through this fazes that allows you to improve.
Work and learning are two activities that naturally happens through the process of play. As the purpose of play is allow you to be the most effective when you learn or work.
There is a weird concept in to our culture that play it is only when the game has no real consequences, I wouldn't call that real play like a game of Monopoly is not playing because it is voided of purpose, you are not learning or producing anything. A game of monopoly is simulating playing, it is pretending that you are playing.
The purpose of play is to make you detached enough of the consequences of your action in order to perform at your best. When you are playing and you experience failure it is a lot easier for you to get over the failure and try again. The detachment doesn't come from the absence of failure, it comes from the understatement that playing involves failure.
Another misconception about playing is that you can't play when you are doing serious things, like when you are facing real consequences. If the purpose of play is to make you very efficient and effective, to say that you shouldn't play when things are serious is to say that you shouldn't be efficient or effective with the things in your life that have the higher stakes. It is especially with those things that you want to maintain your playful attitude.
