Why try something new?

Today’s blog over on NaNoWriMo is worth the price of admission. (yeah I know you thought I’d stop talking about them now, but in fact I spent a spit of time today coming up with a soft ending to my story!). By that, I mean you should go over and read the whole thing. It’s by a staffer who didn’t “win”, getting only a fraction of the word goal set down during the month. But she writes about all the things she gained via the process. And that’s really what the concept is: Sit down regularly, do the work, keep going, do some more work, finish it flaws, warts and all, start over. And trying new things is part of that mix.

To quote one of our esteemed MLs, Saker Pup:

Every time you try something new, you risk failure. That’s why most people who aren’t small children don’t try new things.

They spend their lives creating a routine that will insulate them from doing anything unfamiliar because most people can’t do unfamiliar things perfectly. And if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing all the time, you might accidentally screw something up and fail.

I’ll tell you a secret: I fail at most things, at least at first, and it hasn’t killed me yet.

Failure isn’t something to be afraid of. Failure means I tried.

Failure is the process I must endure before I can achieve success.

Failure is beautiful.

I see this so much in my day to day world. People not-so-old on up will tell me all the reasons why they’re bad at using a computer or whatever and point to the nearest child and say “look at that – a small child can do this better than me.”

Which is true if you don’t try. Kids don’t worry about failure. Kids keep pushing buttons to see how it works, where the thing they need is, how to make the birds fly through the air.

So, so what if you don’t know something. If you want to, you’ll put aside not knowing it for the pleasure of trying it. And if you fail the first time, you’ll try again. And when you succeed, you’ll have that fist-pumping, happy-dancing glory moment to exalt in both the trying and the win.

I suppose you might try and not achieve the success you dream of. Or you might not like it. That’s ok. You’ve kept your ability to try things limber and ready to go.

If you don’t try at all, what have you got? Not much.