Since graduating college and joining Live Bash I’ve been forced to rethink my relationship to failure.
I majored in mathematics where much of my success was predicated on my ability to answer questions correctly. There are many ways to arrive at a solution, but ultimately, right is right, and wrong is wrong. Thus, I was made to feel like an abject failure every time I answered a question incorrectly. It was through four years of this feedback loop that fear of failure became ingrained in me.
For the longest time, I mistakenly believed that achieving my goals would be impossible if I were to falter at any step along the way. This broken thought was paralyzing and prevented me from pursuing worthwhile endeavors. I was under the impression that to achieve success, failure must be avoided in |absolute|.
It was through joining Live Bash that I was forced to redefine my outlook. When I started, there were a huge amount of unknowns facing our company. I felt stressed erroneously thinking that everything needed to be quickly and correctly solved on the first attempt. I was looking for the one correct answer for each problem, to close the loop instead of embracing the process.
One of our core values at Live Bash is to “always be iterating”. We’re unafraid of missing the mark initially since we know that we’ll keep tinkering until our output is in a place we’re comfortable with. This goes hand in hand with another one of our core values to “present work to each other early and often”. Frequently sharing work makes the prospect of failing less daunting and instead turns it into a collaborative process. This mindset makes Live Bash adaptable, sustainable, and most importantly, supportive.
Turns out, the more you try and fail, the more you can focus on how to improve. I have rewired my brain to internalize that regularly failing doesn’t make you a failure. On the contrary, my newfound ability to wrap my arms around failing has enabled me to understand the foundations through which valuable and lasting enterprises are built
*The views and opinions expressed here are my own and not necessarily reflective of those of Live Bash.
Author
Eduardo Rihan
Finance