“What would you do if you couldn’t fail?”

Probably the same things you’re doing now.

Your first thought would probably be: “That’s just not true, I’ll go and try all the things that I didn’t dare before, I’ll go climb Everest and start my own corporation, and I’ll go do that as soon as tomorrow!”

And that’s the problem. You see, our fear of failure is not logical by any means. We’re not afraid to try because we’re afraid of fail, we’re afraid to try because… we’re afraid to try. Trying takes effort, and we don’t like effort. We like results. To be more specific, we like results without doing the work. Very rarely do we actually fail at something, because in order to truly fail and recognize defeat, we have to have done quite a bit of trying.

We rarely fail, most of the time we simply give up. We give up because we get bored, we get tired of trying, and we convince ourselves we just don’t care. Most of the time, we don’t try because we feel like it doesn’t matter enough.

So here’s a better question: “What would you do if it doesn’t matter if you fail OR succeed?”

This, in a way, frees you from the entire concept of failure. You would just act because you WANT to act, rather than act because you want to result. When we’re result-oriented, we lose sight of the purpose, and we’re no longer on our turf.