The desire to fail on the way to reaching a bigger goal is the untold secret to success.
– Seth Godin, Tribes
In Tribes, bestselling author Seth Godin explains how there are plenty of Dreams out in the world and plenty of people with those Dreams. Thus, it’s not a lack of ideas and Dreams, but rather the will to do them that stops us – for all of these efforts are often thwarted by one thing: Fear.
Seth then goes on to say that it’s not actually fear of failure, but rather fear of criticism that causes us to not act. I found this particularly profound. What if we were never told that failure was bad? What if the purpose of life was to find the point at which we fail in order to reach our limits? Does failure not then become a goal, a measure of success?
If we can look at challenges, at failures, at the roadblocks and struggles that come from them as positives – as stepping stones to our goals – then fear becomes a fading memory, an illusion of what once held us back but now is no more. For without fear, our Dreams are truly there for the taking and failure, as Seth says, really does become the “untold secret to success.”