02.16.06
Try Something New and Fail Miserably
Winning is great, but losing in a really extreme fashion can be even better.
To give you an example, I play on a soccer team at work. We are generally pretty terrible but continue to improve all the time. One week, our goalie was absent, so I played substitute goalkeeper. Not only did I play during my team’s match, but 2 subsequent teams asked me to play for them as well (I suppose there was a goalie strike that week or somesuch nonsense).
To say that things went badly would be an understatement. I would have been thrilled if things had gone well enough to be described as merely a poor performance. I was a disaster, letting in 14 goals over the 3 games. For those of you that aren’t soccer fans, to put this in perspective, there are professional goalkeepers that can go for half a season without allowing in 14 goals. To my credit, I did stop a number of shots, and the teams I played with weren’t good defenders, but it was a disaster, plain and simple.
Not only was the scoreline a problem, but the teams I was playing for were very vocal in their displeasure with my performance. Each game, things started off friendly, but by the end I was almost as afraid of my team as of our opponents.
At this point, you are probably saying to yourself, what does this have to do with fun? Despite the misery of the experience at the time, I have to say, it is one of the better days of my life. Never have I so abjectly failed at anything. I now know what a true disaster is like, and it all happened in a very controlled way with no long term consequences. I have known tons of people that won’t try new things because they are worried they will be bad at them. Well, I tell you all, that is the precise reason you should try new things. You are terrible at first, and can experience the intense awareness of your inability in a direct way with no real impact on your life. Being acutely aware of your lack of ability in an area shows you how much room you have for self improvement. It is only that feeling that gets you motivated to do anything of any substance in the world. So get our there and start failing today!