Don't fail fast. Fail often.

What if we loved being bad at things?

We don't. We hate being bad at things. We fear failure. We avoid trying new things, especially if we think we won't be good at them. Some of us don't even consider new ideas because we fear learning about a point of view from which we aren't already successful. We stagnate. As the world around us changes, we become less and less able to adapt.

That's no fun. Let's get back to fun!

For most of us, being a kid is fun.

When you're a kid, you are learning everything for the first time. You don't have expectations for how quickly you should learn. You don't know when you're done learning, and you are unaware that you're even in the learning process. All of your existence is constant learning.

We start off unaware and receptive, and we learn at astounding rates with no bounds on what we should learn. We learn everything that seems relevant, and we have no frame of reference to judge something as irrelevant.

We are perfect learners.

Honestly, the world might be a much better place if we never left that frame. Unfortunately, we did.

At some point, somebody told us that we finished learning. We won the baseball game. Our test was graded. We were told that learning was finite, and we were given labels that defined our abilities, like ‘winner’ or ‘average student’. We internalized those labels, built them into our sense of self, and imposed limits on what we should try based on those judgements.

We live in a culture that defines a successful child as having grown up. The journey ends when you exit childhood. You have arrived. You are a success. You have crested the plateau of learning, and you are expected to have less and less to learn as you grow older.

Damn. Now, we're back to no fun. How do we stop living like that?

We have to take a leap of faith off that plateau.

Wait. That sounds scary.

Have no fear. This is a framing exercise, so we can change the frame.

You were never on a plateau. You just couldn't see that you were on the same slope you've always been on. Also, that slope doesn't have to be a steep incline. We can turn the frame and make it as gentle a journey as you want.

It's unlikely we'll ever stop defining our ego in terms of our success. However, we can redefine what it means to be successful.

One of the worst things I could wish on a business or person is wild initial success. If you have a long streak of beginner’s luck, when you finally lose, you don’t look for what you should change. Instead, you look for external factors to blame. You will have built a belief system that you are successful because you have no faults. You are less likely to learn how to adapt to change when it threatens your whole sense of self to even entertain the notion that you might have areas for improvement.

When we succeed without failure, we don't learn. We don't grow. We just stroke our egos and get validation. We base our ego and our sense of worth in past glories, and we try to protect our ego when we fear we won't get validation if we fail.

That's a trap though. Failure is just as good as success. Actually, it's better.

When we fail, we have the opportunity to learn and grow. When we have never failed, we lack resiliency, and we don’t have the skills to recover from failure.

What if we embrace failure as a friend and mentor? What if we make failing and learning a more valuable definition of success? What if we assume the key to success is failing enough to learn what makes for success? What if we refuse to acknowledge success unless there is also failure?

What if we removed the Syndrome from Imposter Syndrome, and embraced the ideal that being a fraud is the first step in learning to be the real deal?

What if it wasn't just safe to fail? What if it was fun to fail?

What if we loved being bad at things?

Nothing could stop us.