Falling Forward
“I am learning to understand rather than immediately judge or to be judged. I cannot blindly follow the crowd and accept their approach. I will not allow myself to indulge in the usual manipulating game of role creation. Fortunately for me, my self-knowledge has transcended that and I have come to understand that life is best to be lived and not to be conceptualized. I am happy because I am growing daily and I am honestly not knowing where the limit lies. To be certain, every day there can be a revelation or a new discovery. I treasure the memory of the past misfortunes. It has added more to my bank of fortitude.”
– Bruce Lee
• • •
It’s 2am, and I’m wondering the halls of the USG Ishimura, a “planetcracker” starship that’s infested with all sorts of horrible creatures that I have come to know as Necromorphs. I am cautiously working my way to the ships fuselage. …Maybe cautiously isn’t the right word. It would be better to describe it as “somehow I am surviving step by step”. My crew and I crash landed on a recovery mission when we received a distress signal. When we arrived, we were ambushed by these creatures that had once been the crew members of the Ishimura.
I’ve begun to uncover clues as to what caused these mutations. It appears to have something to do with a thing called “the marker.” It seems like no matter where I go these bastard things craw out of the walls and impale me. Over and over, I think I’ve found a way or accomplished my next objective only to suddenly see my screen go red, and a creature with a missing jaw hacks mechanically at me with their mutilated limbs, flailing their distorted torso with an empty alien look in their eyes and a scream that will never leave me. I’m not giving up though. No way. Luckily, I have this plasma cutter to dismember these mutated piles of… Oh wait, this isn’t a blog about Dead Space.
…Nope…
It’s about failure.
Atychiphobia: the abnormal, unwarranted, and persistent fear of failure, a type of specific phobia. As with many phobias, atychiphobia often leads to a constricted lifestyle and is particularly devastating for its effects on a person’s willingness to attempt certain activities.
• • •
In video games, we fail constantly. It can be frustrating, but we know there’s something more if we just keep trying. Last night while I was playing Dead Space, I realized how many times I had died in the game. I restrain myself from over-indulging in video games too often, so I have taken breaks from it, but the thought to walk away from it until I beat it has never crossed my mind. (clarification: in the last phrase are you saying that what has never crossed your mind is walking away before you beat it? that you keep playing until you beat it, then you can walk away, correct? I would use “before” instead of “until” in the sentence as it’s written.)
While wondering the halls of the Ishimura, I began to think about the way I view failure and the various ways we interact with the world when we experience failure. I’m definitely no angel when it comes to failing. I’ve had plenty of moments when I lost my cool or even shut people that are close to me out during these moments of highly sensitive struggles to attain my ambitions.
The truth is that we fail all the time in our endeavors. It’s always interesting to me how in many stories the hero is often seen struggling or failing throughout the entire narrative, only to grind out the stress, gain the higher ground, and accomplish their worthy cause at the end. The typical “happily-ever-after”.
It’s also interesting to note the degree at which we take things so incredibly seriously. I mean, no one ever emotionally seethes over something as trivial as a video game right?
In most cases, we’re not particularly emotionally attached to the outcome of many of our failures, and we easily let these occurrences pass without levying emotional stress. That’s because we have identified these situations or endeavors as low payoff experiences. High payoffs tend to be things that change our lives: jobs, relationships, competition, health, etc… things that hold invaluable, consequential nuance to our envisioned idea of a perfect life or self identity.
This differential ability is really interesting to me, because it shows a willingness to believe or not believe that a result of a performed experience is considered a success or failure. It shows that we can choose to give varying degrees of value, and it shows that we have it in us to try over and over again or walk away unfazed. Why can some people do this more easily than others?
When we break down everything we know about failure and success in regards to how we perform in our actions (or whether we perform these actions at all), the results are subject to what we have decided to believe about our abilities.
Google tells me that failure is defined as:
- Lack of success.
- The omission of expected or required action.
Let’s go a little further with these definitions and discover something:
1. Lack of success
Success itself is a very subjective term with a lot of perceptive, or “value-based” variables. Essentially, it means “satisfactory results”. So, by proxy of this definition, the result of failure is subjective as well. If an individual or team choose to give success a distinction through categorical degree of benchmarks, values, and developed belief systems, then success and failure would follow under those imposed guidelines.
“Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill.
2. The omission of expected or required action.
Failure as the omission of expected or required action. Failure is something logical to calculate, but beyond that, it’s just your imagination. The fear of failure is something that cripples us to the point of exhaustion and depression. It’s very easy to give up at that point: You’ve proven yourself right. You can’t do it, because you won’t do it. And you have learned nothing, because you’ve evaded the experience altogether. You didn’t even try, and that’s where your failure is 100% factual.
In both of these cases, I believe that as long as you are learning, you are able to grow. As long as you are growing, you’re never in the process of failing.
• • •
Elon Musk is one of the greatest innovators of our time. He’s someone at the forefront of radical human revolution through fierce determination, technological advancement, and an ability to be relentless in his endeavor to bring about effective engineering and design that will most effect the future of humanity.
His story and the things he invest his time into are incredibly inspiring, primarily focusing on sustainable energy, clean transportation, and interplanetary space travel. Elon is the founder of SpaceX (CEO) and Co-Founder of Zip2 (sold $307 Mil), Pay Pal (sold 1.5 Billion), and Tesla Motors (CEO). He is also the chairman of SolarCity and is spearheading a conceptual high-speed transportation system called the “Hyperloop”.
Zip2 helped bring media companies online in the 90s, and Pay Pal revolutionized online payments. In 2014, SolarCity installed a third of the nations solar panels, being the largest solar panel installer in the country for the second year in a row. SpaceX is leading the way to Mars and for space exportation. Tesla is literally driving the electric car and sustainable transportation industry into what will be the inevitable social norm, and the Hyperloop will one day take passengers and cargo from L.A. to San Francisco in about 30 mins, opening a host of possible personal meetings, business, and newly discovered intrigues.
Reading over his story, you will notice many successes of ginormous proportions, for which the results continuously resound around the world (and will for ages to come). But also in nearly every interview, he doesn’t skip over the enormous amounts of struggles and disappointments he’s had to overcome. He points out that both Tesla and SpaceX have both been on the brink of collapse, only to bounce back in extraordinary fashion.
What are the mental frameworks of someone like Elon? This very question caused David Ly Khim to research Musk’s ambitious life philosophies and then create a list of what he feels are the most valuable lessons.
To summarize the article “6 Lessons from Elon Musk That Changed My Life,” the lessons are:
1. Endlessly Seek Criticism.
“While compliments create contentment, criticism creates improvement” – Khim
2. Challenge reality (by understanding the fundamentals).
“Upset the status quo. Ask tough questions. Explore the fundamental truths behind the challenges in your life. Explore how things really work by making “why” your favorite question to ask.” – Khim
“Boil things down to the most fundamental truths. Then reason up from there.” – Musk
3. Focus on signal over noise.
“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.” – Steve Jobs
“Will this activity result in a better product? If not, stop those efforts.” – Musk
4. Make failure an option (by defining a contingency plan)
SpaceX Contingency Plan:
Falcon 1: Launch the Falcon 1 rocket successfully with in a minimal budget, or they disperse the company. The over arching goal is to make space travel and workflow affordable. The first three launches failed, but on the fourth, they launched not only the rocket, but also the company, into a $1.6 Billion commission for 12 resupply flights to the International Space Station.
“…Failure is an option here. If things are not failing you’re not innovating enough… ” – Musk
BOOM!
5. Remove Worries (by living the worst-case scenario)
Define your worst-case result based on your contingency plan. See if you can simulate what living with that failure would feel like, and explore it with thoughts, writing, and perhaps living it a little.
“Back then I was mostly living off of hotdogs and oranges. I figured if I could live off a dollar a day then, at least from a food stand point, it’s pretty easy to earn $30 a month.” – Musk
6. Solve Problems Beyond Yourself.
“If something is important enough, even if the odds are against you, you should still do it.” – Musk
I strongly suggest checking out Khim’s article which he includes action steps and exercises from the Elon lessons he’s collected.
For more on Elon Musk keep up with him on twitter @elonmusk or check out his wiki page.
• • •
Returning to Atychiphobia, there are many causes that link us to the fear of failure- overly critical and unsupportive family or traumatic events, for instance:
If your parents constantly treated you like a terrorist, never took your word as truth the first time, or consistently believed another authoritarian figure over you when you were being honest and forthcoming, these sorts of things usually cause a tendency to always second guess yourself. You’d be surprised how many people experienced this.
Let’s say you gave a presentation in high school, and you froze or the delivery wasn’t the desired result. The experience could have been so diminishing that you began to fear the possibility of failing in many other aspects of the way in which you express yourself.
Fear:
noun: An unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat.
verb: be afraid of (someone or something) as likely to be dangerous, painful, or threatening.
Fear is natural, and I’m not convinced even the most courageous people to have ever lived do not encounter it. Rather, the way we respond or react to fear becomes our result. It’s entirely controllable, but it takes work. By becoming aware of the source of these fears, we can begin focusing on the development of character strengths to alleviate those pathologies. It’s commonly said from successful people when asked what they feel the difference is between them and others is their willingness and ability to do the work.
• • •
“People’s beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities. Ability is not fixed property; there is a huge variability in how you perform. People who have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failures; they approach things in terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about what can go wrong.” – Albert Bandura
Self-Efficacy: The belief in one’s capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to manage prospective situations.
“I can do…” statements.
Self-Concept: One’s perception of their self, including ability related perceptions and feelings about those ability related perceptions.
“I’m good at…” statements.
Self-Esteem: An overall evaluation of the self as a person of worth.
“On the whole, I am…” statements.
The psychologist Albert Bandura’s outlines various effects and concepts of Self-Efficacy. He references the determining result of our performance is determined by the following sources:
• Personal Experience
• Vicarious Experiences
• Verbal Persuasion
• Physiological Feedback
He states that individuals “function as contributors to their own motivation, behavior, and development within a network of reciprocally interacting influences”.
- People with higher self-efficacy view problems as something to be mastered, have a deeper interest and commitment to these interest, and recover quickly from setbacks or disappointments.
- People with low self-efficacy avoid challenging tasks believing that these are beyond their scope of accomplishment, focus on failings and negative out comes, and lose their confidence in their abilities.
Learning to cultivate higher levels of self-efficacy allows us to live in a more efficient, productive, and healthy way. It allows us the space to reach our optimal abilities, rather than absorbed in a shadow of stagnant potential. When you cultivate or give in to lower levels of self-efficacy you begin to allow life circumstances to be dictated for you.
“In this view, people are self organizing,
proactive, self-regulating, and self-reflecting.
They are contributors to their life circumstances
not just products of them.” – Albert Bandura
“They are contributors to their life circumstances, not just products of them”…more and more when we draw awareness and redefine the source of our doubts, we begin to focus on Self-Actualization. Not only are we the contributors to our lives, we are the creators. We affect everything we encounter, infusing all of life with a ripple of our energy.
I suppose this would be a great way to wrap it up, but there’s something that I feel is vital to a healthy way of living that I’ve left out. It’s our ability to cultivate a co-habitable creative and productive force beyond just our own lives. It’s looking at others as community instead of competition. As we experience shifts and difficulties in building, fortifying, and executing our abilities, so are others around us. While it’s easy to lessen our focus on other peoples lives while we are faced with daunting tasks, it’s also one of the best times to reach out to others with words of encouragement and find ways to lift others up.
The people we are especially close to shouldn’t be the only ones giving us encouragement, and as individuals, we shouldn’t be the only ones focused on our passionate intentions. Others may not want this sort of compassion or sense of community from you, and that’s fine; there’s an entire resource of people either extended into your greater local community or on the internet. Make “crowdsourcing” information a thing in your life. Others will welcome your encouragement and return the energy. Be genuine about it; don’t just look for an angle that only benefits you. When you sincerely cultivate your awareness for the “greater good,” others see it, and this opens up incredible doors for you to help them see it in themselves.
“I came to the conclusion that we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask. Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment…” – Elon Musk
Everyone fails all the time, but perhaps failure is our greatest key to success. Your mind is arguably the most fertile soil there is. Ideas, personal definitions, experiences, and information are all seeds that will grow, and the result will be your life.
Everyday, ask yourself what seeds are being planted in within you.