When Everything Is an Experiment, Nothing Is a Failure
In college, the classes I liked I passed easily. Those that were boring to me I attended, but did none of the work, fell behind, and failed all the tests. To this day I wish I could shout back to that JT and just tell him to drop the fucking class!
Even if he could hear my time-traveling shout, I’m not sure he could’ve implemented it. He felt immense pressure to keep going forward, but he had been turned around in a pitch black room. How do go forward when you don’t know which way it is? Apparently he felt the answer was with fake confidence and without asking for help.
Failure didn’t feel like it was an option for him. He couldn’t express his feelings and if he had he wouldn’t have been heard or he would have been told to toughen up or maybe he would’ve been prayed for. Even though he knew what would happen at the end of the semester he couldn’t do anything about it.
I have felt a lot of shame for those decisions. I thought success was a requirement and something was wrong with me. I didn’t know that it was ok to be bad at some things. Yeah, I hear how ridiculous that sounds, but it was almost as if I didn’t speak the language needed to understand my own emotions. No one around me spoke it so how was I supposed to learn it?
It was during those days where that me decided to just stop failing. In order to do that he would have to be extremely selective of what he tried. He would need to perfect every aspect of his next attempt. See it from every angle. Have every possible tool before beginning. That way he wouldn’t fail anymore.
It kinda worked. He didn’t fail at the projects he attempted. But he was failing at flourishing because he’d isolated himself from the learning that comes from failing.
This realization hit me one day when watching a Vanwives video on youtube and they had just fucked something up on their cabin build and in such a casual fashion said something like, “Whelp! Now we’ve learned not to do that! Time to go back to the hardware store!”
They were learning lessons left and right and I was maybe doing a project every few months! I wanted what they had, but didn’t know how to get it for a while.
I think it was Tim Ferriss stating that he calls his projects “Experiments” that gave me the idea. I pulled out my phone the next day and recorded a few fun, silly videos that I would have framed as failure a few days before, but now they were successful experiments because the objective was just to learn something.
I’ve now used that word/technique dozens of times. I’ve started learning 3D modeling, filmed and posted some snowboarding videos, written a blog/substack, become a better parent, and more just because I called what I was doing an experiment.
What made me realize how powerful of a tool I’d stumbled upon was finding it in George Mack’s essay on High Agency. He states,
“One tool to make [escaping rumination] easier is to reframe decisions as experiments. You’re no longer a perfectionist frozen on stage with everyone watching your every move, you’re a curious scientist in a lab trying to test a hypothesis.”
So I guess this makes me a full time scientist just testing stuff! Learning is so much fun any outcome is seen as success!
This post reminded me of an episode of Mythbusters
P.S. I feel like I need to put in one more credit here. Crystal Drinkwalter from the Vanwives also taught me another lesson in today’s post. In a vulnerable moment she was talking about her childhood and said that “she wasn’t ready for school.” It was probably just a passing statement for most. But that statement took me back to college. It made me realize I wasn’t ready for it either, but I didn’t know it was ok to not be ready for it. So I tried to carry the burden of it as well as the shame for being bad at it for most of my life. Crystal sharing that allowed me to let go of the shame I had for not being ready for college.
