Fail Faster
Ever met someone who does everything perfectly the first time?
Well, there’s that one Pinterest mom who comes to mind, but I’m going to break the news to you. Even she doesn’t have it all together. A study by Thomas Curran and Andrew P. Hill on British, Canadian, and American college students over time showed a significant increase in anxiety over perfectionism. Students today feel pressured to perform perfectly, more so than in 1989 when the study began. Social perfectionism has caused many of today’s young adults to say, Why bother? Why should they shoot for an impossible standard? I’ll hear young adults bow out of harder jobs because they want a better quality of life. Is that the case or are they fearful of failing and taking the safe route?
I want to let them in on a not-so-secret secret:
We’re all failures.
It’s not my most motivational sentence, but it’s true. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). It’s why we need a savior. The Old Testament law doesn’t save us, but it’s a good measure of how lacking we are. We can’t get to heaven by works. We’re saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, which frees us from the heavy burden of perfectionism.
God doesn’t ask for perfection. He asks for our love.
It’s okay to fail. Failure is how we grow. Think of a child learning to walk. They must get out of their comfort zone and step out of balance. The possibility of falling looms, but the more steps taken, the more comfortable we become with the rhythm of living out of balance.
Being an author is a good example of learning to appreciate failure. Both my publisher and I pay editors to point out my mistakes. It’s brutal to see all the red marks, but I improve much faster learning from my own errors than by reading about grammar rules and how to write. I must get comfortable with finding mistakes and see them as a training method.
With perfectionism off the table, the best way to success is to become adept at failing. John C. Maxwell, leadership speaker, and author said, “Fail early, fail often, but always fail forward.” Life is about learning and growing. We need to value the process.
The best way to begin is to start. Sounds redundant but sometimes we can over research and over analyze and be too fearful to start. I learn best from doing. I must give it a try, which for me meant writing a hundred thousand-word manuscript that will never leave my computer, but it made my next manuscript publishable.
Don’t be so risk-averse that you can’t absorb failure and bounce back. If you are afraid of failing, life can become very small. Your safe place can become a self-imposed claustrophobic box.
Patience is a Fruit of the Spirit. Dreams are conceived long before they come to fruition, but in the meantime practice for greatness. Joseph had a big dream, but it took a roundabout way for him to get there. He worked to the best of his ability no matter what the job or circumstance—as Potipher’s servant and as his jailer’s assistant, and eventually his opportunity arose to go before Pharaoh. All along God had been preparing him to be Pharaoh’s right-hand man.
There will be naysayers. You can’t avoid criticism, but you can choose what to listen to. Not all criticism is bad. Take a deep breath and put your defensive pride away. Use God’s discernment to know what advice is meant to thwart God’s plans for you and which is meant to sharpen you. What a naysayer intended for harm, God can use for your good. Just ask Joseph (Genesis 50:20).
Failure isn’t meant to be feared. God’s ready to pick us up when we fail. The more we fail the faster we learn to walk in His purpose for us.