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I’m terrified of failure. It’s one of the things I cannot seem to shake no matter how much I feel or take action, learn, face my demons or live on this planet. I’m just terribly afraid of failing.
There is one very good reason for this. You see for me, failing means that I lose the love I’m used to receive from the outside.
This is one painful thing to admit. Because our society as it is currently is programming children with this deeply disturbing pattern.
When You do “badly” in school/home/kindergarten You get punished. Be it in the form of physical abuse, bad grades or the emotional abuse stemming from the doing “badly”. The list here is very long. Here I must say that I don’t have in mind a society of so called pussies that get away with everything they do. Because that is a recipe for disaster. And unfortunately another extreme where some parts of our society seem to be moving.
I want to be very clear, this is not what I have in mind.
What I have in mind is a new type of relating to failure. Be it with men, women, children, animals, prisoners, all of mankind.
First of all, that it’s okay to fail. Knowing that it’s okay to fail is the first step. What do we need for that? We need new leaders who see failure as a stepping stone for success. And instead of punishing those humans or animals, we need to dig in, get our hands and minds dirty, start exploring what is happening. One way of doing this is listening to the person in question, having empathy towards them and when they are ready, challenging them with what and how they are showing up in their lives. You see we are all the same as in we are humans. But we learn, we feel, we experience things differently. That means the approach to education of humans has to change dramatically.
We need a more personalized approach to education. Be it formal or just a class You take online. That means the educators themselves have to learn a lot, have to listen to the specific needs of a human and then take action. And if You are worrying where to take the time for this, soon many tasks that humans use to do will be done by robots. That will leave us with plenty of time to spare, to learn, to grow, to fail and to educate the next generations more from the perspective of what they need to thrive. Instead of what the “machine” that our current society has become wants.
The second thing, seeing humans as the society not a resource to the society itself.
We currently have it backwards. Children and adults have to be fitted into a mold where they don’t fit. The increasing amounts of suicides and illnesses are just a few examples showing us the fault in our ways. Here the only question we must ask is, is it good for the people? And then really dig deep before coming to a conclusion. Only take action if the result to the inquiry at hand has the best interests of humans in mind.
We have to put ourselves first, we have to put humans first. Only then the true nature of mankind can start to thrive the way it is intended to.
Ian Altosaar
