You must not fail

 You must not fail at anything important or

something terrible will happen.

Fear of failure is a huge roadblock to trying

things and doing things. So many of us have

the idea that we have to be perfect or nobody

will love us and we’ll be failures. That is just

not true at all. If you suffer from this belief,

consider this: are your friends perfect? When

they make a mistake, do you hate them and

scorn them? That would be ridiculous—they’re

only human, right? Everybody makes mistakes.

Everybody, including you. In fact, nothing gets

discovered or created without any mistakes.

How many times did Thomas Edison try to

invent the light bulb before he actually came

up with something that worked?

If you refuse to ever fail or make a mistake,

you’re consigning yourself to a life of passivity,

and that’s the biggest failure of all. You have to

mess up to learn and grow. In fact, sometimes

“failures” turn out to be wildly successful and

better than the original intent. For example,

the removable, re-stickable adhesive that

makes Post-It Notes possible was developed in

a failed attempt to make a super permanent

adhesive.18 We should all be so lucky as to fail

like that!