A few days ago I started thinking about reading and about learning. I've been doing both for quite a while now, and the only thing I want in regards to both is to keep on doing them, to learn, to grow, and to understand more.
That comes with a bit of a risk, like everything in life, mainly the risk of failure. I can easily fail at learning something new, at understanding a new concept, at remembering a piece of information that might be useful to me at some point in my life. There's a lot of things I can fail at in my quest to learn and grow.
I however learned to accept failure as an integral part of the process. I learned to accept it as something that happens and will happen to me for the rest of my life. I learned to deal with failure and to follow my goal regardless of how big the chance to fail is.
I did all that because failing is not the end. Failing is natural. And as long as I try, there's a chance I might succeed.
Recently I started reading a little about history, not much, and nothing too complicated, but at least it's something. I finished reading a book and while I understood some events, some went over my head, not necessarily because they were too complex for me to understand but because I didn't care that much about them.
As I was reading those parts of the book I started to think about the process of learning more about history and I felt a bit discouraged, thinking that I might not be able to learn as much as I wish and master history as much as I'd like simply because I do not care that much about certain parts of it. I will never be able to remember specific dates, specific names or specific locations. I just don't really remember those kind of things. I never could and probably never will.
That made me also think about giving up, because I could see failure ahead of me. In that moment I saw the entire process as a black and white scenario - if I cannot learn about history the proper way, then why should I even try, if I know I'll fail?
Well, that's not right. Trying does not equal failure. Learning, as much as possible, will allow me to know more about the events in the past than I knew before trying. Therefore, I would have accomplished part of my goal - I learned more about history. My knowledge will go from very little to something more and better.
Giving up on the entire process however, simply because I am afraid of failure, does nothing but assure me that I'll succeed at failing. If I do not even try to learn history because I am too afraid that I'll fail, then I already failed - I chose, willingly, to not learn more about history which literally means failing at my initial goal.
Once again, this is one of those obvious things that somehow make more sense one day when you randomly think about them. But it is a good way of thinking about failure and why it's important that you at least try to do something that you're afraid of failing at, because you never know what can happen as you try, but you do know that if you don't - fail.