The Plan for Action #4 - Fail constructively by failing intentionally

    Not long ago I posed the question as to whether good grades are a form of child abuse, but without a doubt, the current concept and use of grading is child abuse. And in particular, the way failing grades have taken away the constructive power of failure.

The role of failure

    It is unrealistic, indeed blasphemous, to assume that we live in a world where everyone can be perfect, and must never make mistakes. Of course people make mistakes, and of course they do wrong. From this we can understand the first purpose of failure: recognizing that in order to have any sort of sane, peaceful world, we must learn how to handle failure from ourselves and from those around us, and handle it in such a way that we can maintain relationships and civility. In the case of our own failures, there is one additional, and very constructive, purpose of failure:

If you never fail, then you do not know what you are fully capable of.

    If you have ever trained for a physically challenging event like a sport, a fight, or just a challenging hike, failure tells you what you are capable of at the current moment. When I first joined a boxing club, for example, being unable to punch a bag was humiliating. However, it told me that while I thought I knew how to throw a punch, I clearly didn't, and needed instruction. Which they gave me plenty of. Had I never tried, I would have never failed, but never truly succeeded, either.

How to fail constructively

    The first thing you must do is take a risk of some kind. It could be as simple as posting something on Minds to try out an idea of yours. It could be taking on some project you always wanted to do, or it could be attempting to learn a new skill.

    Once you get a hold of the very basics, pick an ambitious goal that you are not capable of at this time. This will force you to push yourself to the point of failure. And when you do fail, take a note of how and why. A friend of mine, a USMC officer, says that his service had a saying, "Pain is weakness leaving the body." In this case, you want to get to the point of either a little pain or a little embarrassment, and use that to motivate you to do more. Further, when you fail, you can then learn from it.

In this way, you can fail constructively by failing intentionally.

    This kind of failure brings the benefit of knowing what you are capable and incapable of. It also brings the benefit of knowing that you can handle failure, and you are therefore able to take measured risk. I say "measured" because you also do not want to take risks on something that could kill you the first time. Someone who didn't understand Bitcoin, but bought $100 worth in the last bubble, learned something about cryptocurrency and is able to take more informed risks in the future.. Someone who mortgaged their house to drop $100,000 on the bubble will be destroyed for a huge chunk of their life. Go fight in the gym before you fight on the street.

Avoid the Morass of Mediocrity

    My dream with this series is to help people who want to bring decentralization to the world, and when the time really comes, every one of us is going to need to take consistent actions, in public, with considerable risk of rejection or embarrassment. You are also going to run into a group of inactivists that I call the "Morass of Mediocrity." These are the types of people who are so afraid to fail and "get it wrong," that they do nothing. Their secret motto is "you can't fail if you don't risk," but as we learned about moral arguments, these people are a living "argument from 0." Because they are a zero.

    Once you start taking action, it exposes their mediocrity. They will be the ones that criticize you for everything you do, and they will lord it over you when you fail. This is why, if you have any fear of failure or rejection, you need to fail constructively by failing intentionally, you need to do it now, and you need to do it until such criticism is water rolling off a duck's back. Only take criticism form people who want you to be greater than you are now, and who know how to get you there.

That's all for this one. Please take a moment in the comments to let me know what you are learning to do, and what failures you've managed to push through.