Fear of Failing

This is a really great article I read today on the topic of not being afraid of failure, but rather to embrace it. In the article you read a blurb about a social experiment run by an art teacher that split a class in two, and informed the two groups that one would be graded on quantity (fifty pounds of pottery for an A), and one on quality (if your first piece of pottery was worth an A, you could do nothing further and earn an A grade for the year). The results were clear, the group that was creating new projects frequently, regardless of the quality of the pieces, learned more and were much more prolific in their work. The students who focused on creating just one perfect piece, agonizing over details, did far worse, because they didn't benefit from the act of failing, and learning from that failure. 

Fear of failure can be, and has been for me, utterly paralyzing. I loved this article because it made some excellent points, namely that fear of failure really ends up stopping you from taking on all sorts of wonderful projects! I can be such a perfectionist that I tend to shy away from projects and topics that I are unfamiliar to me, because I know I won't be good at it. What I really need to focus my attention on is the fact that I won't be good at it until I am. And there isn't any shortcut that will make that happen right away!