Hello my friend,
Last week the letter took a break, and I spent most of that time playing sports 😄 Back at it today though, right on time for Monday.
Something's been sitting with me lately. Just the word. Failure.
Grade 9. I'd taken first rank in every main exam that year. Then the final exam's result came and I finished fourth.
I remember holding the report card and knowing, before anything had happened, that it wasn't going to be a good day at home. Nobody had said a word yet. I already knew. I had failed in the eyes of my parents.
Not blaming anyone. That training gave me real things. Discipline. Showing up prepared. I still use all of it. But it never gave me room to fail.
I had the playbook and I ran it like a script. Never once tried a different approach, because a different approach might not land me in the top three. So, same script, about ten years. Which works great for a routine, a diet, a workout. Terrible for anything you haven't figured out yet. And most things worth doing start there.
Take the founder of Instacart for example. In 2010 Apoorva Mehta quit his well paying job at Amazon and moved to San Francisco with no plan. Built an ad network for gaming companies, failed. Social network for lawyers, failed. Around twenty companies in two years, all dead. A book of failures. Then in 2012 he looked at his own empty fridge and that became Instacart. Which is now worth billions.
So why does failing feel so physically bad? I went looking. Turns out difficulty isn't what spikes your stress response. Being judged is, and it hits hardest when you can't control the outcome. People with perfectionist tendencies run that judgement radar louder than most.
Which stopped me, because look at what I wrote up there. Failed in the eyes of my parents. I typed that without thinking. The eyes were the whole thing. It was never the fourth rank.
Here's the part I actually wanted to get to.
Now when I look back the best stretch of my career so far was the one where I was failing constantly. Early days, nowhere near the job I wanted. Tried something, didn't work, pivoted. Tried harder, gave it a few years, realised this isn't for me either. Then one day it clicked. Oh. This is what I like doing. And I went all in.
Failed a lot in those years. While getting paid, which is the ideal setup 😄 And somewhere in it I stopped minding.
Then it faded. I think because once something finally works, you start protecting it. Same Grade 9 kid, different subject.
So here's what I've landed on. It was never the goal that stopped me. It was the verdict.
Keep wanting the thing. Want it badly. Just don't let one attempt tell you whether you're the kind of person who can pull it off. That's the part with your parents' eyes in it, and you can drop it and keep everything else.
This week's nudge:
Take one step toward the thing you've been putting off, and don't grade it. Keep the goal. Just don't let attempt one hand you a verdict.
Nobody's watching as closely as you think 😊
Before you go, one small ask. If these letters mean something to you, forward this to one person you think would like it too. That's how Here & Now grows, one reader at a time 💌
Warmly,
Narman
Trying ways to fail more