From Tune Into the True You, the free 31-day course I made in December 2015. A week of it was about fear and failure.
Luke Skywalker's X-wing is sunk in a swamp. Yoda tells him to lift it out with the Force. Luke says, all right, he'll give it a try.
"No. Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try." (Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back, 1980)
Everyone remembers that line. Fewer people remember what comes next. Luke gives up, so Yoda lifts the X-wing out of the swamp himself, easy as anything, and sets it down on the bank. Luke stares at it. "I don't believe it."
"That is why you fail."
That's the bit I care about. If you believe you can do something, you've got a good chance. If you believe you're going to fail, you will, every time. And "try" is usually an excuse made before you start. "I'll give it a try" means "I don't think I can, but I'll show willing." So what have you been trying to do, when you could be committing to it?
Call it research
There's a line usually credited to Thomas Edison. "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." When I first came across that idea, it started to change my life. It put everything I'd ever got wrong into a new light.
What if the things you've called failures were actually research? You didn't fail. You just didn't find the right way yet, and you found another way that doesn't work. They say good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions. You learn your biggest lessons from the things you get wrong. So if you learn from it, there's no failure. Just research.
Go further and look at the bigger events in your life and the meaning you've given them. A bereavement, say, or the end of a relationship. Maybe something that happened at school that you think has held you back ever since. You can't always control what happens outside you, but you can choose what it means. What did it teach you? Maybe it taught you to stand up for yourself. Maybe it made you the person you are now.
Give yourself permission to get it wrong
Nobody ever made it really big by playing safe. You have to give yourself permission to get things wrong if you want the really big things in life.
Most people are so scared of what might go wrong they never start. They think about how much time they could waste, how much money they could lose. They forget to get excited about what happens if it works.
So set some big scary goals. Goals so big that even getting halfway would be better than life is right now. Then circle the one that excites you most and write down why it matters to you and why it has to happen. Once that excitement is in your body, you'll keep going until you find a way.
Fear lives in the future
The crazy thing about fear is that it's always about the future. You can't be afraid of something that's already happened. You can only be afraid it'll happen again. Even if a lion's chasing you right now, your fear is what it'll do if it catches you.
And the great thing about the future, my friend, is that it hasn't happened yet. Your fear might be about something that never comes.
Some fear is useful. It's good to be scared of fast trains and fire. But a firefighter who's too scared of fire can't do their job. A little fear keeps you safe. Too much stops you being who you want to be.
And there's a reason not to quit when it gets hard. So often the biggest resistance turns up right before the breakthrough. Lots of people give up just before they're about to succeed, and they never find out, because they stopped too early. Think about the times you nearly quit and didn't. The project at work where everything was going wrong, then suddenly clicked. It didn't really just click, of course. All that work made it happen.
Try this
Take a sheet of paper and head it "Things I've successfully researched". List the things you once called failures, and next to each one write what it taught you. Then, at the bottom, add a few fears you used to have and don't anymore. You've beaten fear before.
Look at the list and pick one bit of research you're ready to put to use this week.
