As I was perusing my RSS feeds today, I came across this article and was instantly struck with the title, which I’ve shamelessly ripped off and used for the title of my own blog entry on the subject. Hey, credit has been given, so I’m not going to feel guilty. Anyway, I read the article, and followed the link at the bottom to the blog of the author where this was posted. Below is the rather long comment I’ve typed up, but not yet posted to his blog.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————
I grew up with the mindset that it was better to not try than to try and fail. My father, well intentioned though he was, conditioned me to believe that nothing I did was good enough and that I wasn’t capable of achieving my dreams. His intention was to motivate me to press on and do better each time I tried, but projecting the guilt and shame of his own life failures on me only served to teach me that if I didn’t try, I didn’t fail, and if I didn’t fail, I didn’t have to listen to him talk down to me. In my world, failing to try was actually *better* than failing to succeed. I carried that mindset up until I was 30, just 3 short years ago.
When I set out to college, I wanted to get my psychology degree. When I told my parents, I was met with, “Do you think you can handle that?” which triggered the same personal doubts that I’d been conditioned to, and I decided after my first quarter to declare for business; a major I had no interest in, but it’s what my father did, so it must be what I was supposed to do. Having no interest in what I did in college coupled with a lifetime supply of “don’t bother trying, you won’t make it anyway” attitude led to me dropping out of school when my father refused to pay for my poor grades anymore.
Nearly 10 years ago, I took a pay cut from my terrible warehouse job to start off in the IT industry. I’ve been told I’m very intelligent, which I suppose is why I wanted something more mentally stimulating, but I had no real interest in the industry beyond a hobby. Nonetheless, I turned it into a career and ended up working in the webhosting world. Now, I find myself laid off from the only job I knew how to do with no college degree and no professional certifications to help me find new employment. Worse yet, it was work I didn’t even want to be doing. I hated the IT industry because my heart just wasn’t in it. I’ve spent most of the last 3 years wishing I had pushed on and gotten my psych degree.
It’s hard to keep my focus some days, but I’m working toward finding a way to start over in a new industry. I’ve been told I should write, so I’m working on that as well as trying to find a way back into school so I can get that degree I wanted 15 years ago. I’ve come to draw my identity from my work with my church student ministry (traditional youth group plus college age students) and am in bible college, too.
I’ve learned that playing it safe and taking chances may both lead to the same place, until you count the cost and that neither of them is always the best choice. Playing it safe can often keep you from ruin, but it can just as often keep you from riches. The converse is true about taking the risk: you may fail, but you may also succeed, and it is not, in my opinion, failure if you take some wisdom away from it. You only fail when you refuse to learn.
All this is to say that while this article doesn’t, on the surface, seem to address people that believe that it’s better to not try than it is to fail, but rather people that are just apathetic about trying because they expect they will fail, there is hope for people like me, and I wanted to say so. Don’t give up, never surrender. Fight until the break of day and you will invariably find that, whether you stand or fall, you are a success.
[...] this article in the May-June 2008 issue of Psychology Today, I flashed back to one of my recent blog posts in which I wrote about some of my past issues with self-confidence. It occurs to me that, [...]