Blogging to Failure

G is coming home tonight. They dropped the last 2 games. The night before the games she said on the phone, “We need to split.”

Then they didn’t. They lost both.

(I don’t know what “need” means in this context.)

It doesn’t matter. What I want to tell her is that I am envious of her failure. That’s because failure is opportunity. There are no opportunities when you win. When you win, you just feel good, you pat yourself on the back, but you don’t learn anything.

When you fail you feel bad, but now you have the opportunity to bring your best self to the problem, to figure it out, to manage your emotions, to write down what went wrong and what not to do again. You get to practice being a  failure ninja.

If you are a true ninja you will also be able to see the loss as something to be grateful for, and bow to it.

After that,  you move on.

I don’t give myself opportunities to fail very often, if ever.

I play it safe. I am what they call “risk averse.”

It is not a good thing to be. I need to risk things.  This little book I am trying to put together needs to ship. It needs to be put out there to be seen, to risk rejection. That is the only way I am ever going to grow as a writer, a  person, and a ninja. But I resist. I fear failure.

But I am noticing that by doing this blog every day I am sort of training in risk-taking.  For a long time I let it languish, fearing that I whatever I would write would totally suck. So the fact that I am getting myself down to business every day, and then pushing “publish” is a small, but definite gain.  Still, every time I pull the trigger on one of these posts, I feel nauseous. As the days mount, and the low-hanging fruit gets scarce, I find I really have to  work to not suck.

But this is good training for me. It’s like getting used to bee stings, or doing 20 push-ups just to get to that 21^st one you can’t do.

What I am trying to do here is blog to failure. I want to see how how long I can  crank content that isn’t just “what I had for lunch.”  I want to sit down and risk sucking everyday. I want to feel a little less timid about pushing publish.

I wanna be a ninja.