Fail

The question: Is it better to have tried and failed than to have not tried? Is it better to have loved and lost than to have never loved?

Now, being an unbelievably lazy person, I would love to say it is better to just not try. A lot of the time, that is what I end up doing, a lot of the time I'll settle for mediocrity simply because I do not feel motivated enough to make the extra effort. It would also make writing this blog a lot easier. Hurrah for laziness. However, if I were to say that, I would be lying, because that is not what I believe. First off, let us look at the benefits of not trying.......... Well, there really aren't any, are there? I suppose there aren't any downsides, either. If you don't put yourself out there emotionally, you can't get crushed. If you don't apply for the higher job, you can't feel bad if you don't get it. If you run away instead of standing and fighting, whatever the situation is, you can't get hurt. The thing is, at the root of all of these examples of not trying is fear. Fear of getting hurt, crushed, disappointed, etc. It seems to me that you can live without trying, but it will be a life lived in constant fear, which really is no life at all.


Now lets look at the benefits of trying and failing. I suppose it depends on what you are trying and failing to do, but there are some benefits that you gain in just about any situation. The first would be experience. If you fail, then you learn a couple of things that you should not do the next time you try. Thomas Edison said "I have not failed. I have simply found a thousand ways that don't work." Further, my old violin teacher told me once that he hated it when people said "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." He told me that it should be changed to "If at first you don't succeed, try a different way." Running into a brick wall over and over again isn't going to get you to the other side. So in trying and failing, you learn what not to do next time, e.g. run head on into the brick wall. Next time, you might try going under, over or around the wall, and then you get to see what's on the other side. You can look around, and just about everything that we as a species have created is the product of trial and error. Very rarely does anything go perfectly on the first try. When someone sets out to create a great software program, he writes all the code, distributes it, and then he gets feedback. For a program like Windows Vista, the feedback is 99% negative. Seriously, the program is a nightmare. But the programmers take the feedback, revisit the code, and fix the problems. Maybe Vista is a bad example, since it's been out a few years and it's still a nightmare, but the point still stands, that very rarely does something good just happen, it almost always requires a great deal of work.

With something like a relationship, that work is constant. Sometimes relationships are easy, but the moment you stop trying, everything goes downhill. Sometimes it goes downhill anyway. And while there are always painful memories when a relationship ends, there are also good ones. I, for one, would say it's much better to have the good memories to smile about and the bad ones to learn from, than to have never tried, and wonder what might have been. In any situation you have the choice to act or not, and when you act, you learn. When you go passive, you stay the same person and there is no opportunity for personal growth. That's not to say it is always better to act, there are situations when it is far better to listen and observe, but in those situations where the only reason you have for not acting is that you are afraid then it is better to try and fail than to not try at all. And if you really think about it, if you don't try at all, then you still fail, only this way you can fool yourself into believing you didn't. When you try and fail, you learn something about whatever it is you're trying for. When you don't try, you fail not only at the thing you wanted, but at life. Sure, if you run away you can't die, but you can't live either.