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1,000 False Starts — Why you can afford to fail endlessly and still do The Thing
Nobody gets it right all the time. Cut yourself some slack.
Have you ever started A Thing only to find yourself derailed as fast as you began?
Maybe you joined a gym as your resolution for the new year and two weeks into questing for a sweet beach bod you found yourself back on the couch eating an entire bag of BBQ-flavored chips and bingeing Gilmore Girls.
Or perhaps you determined to sit down and spend 30 minutes every day expressing your art only to find after the first month that things were too damn busy to squeeze in that kind of creative pursuit.
Eating healthier, getting up early, shining brightly at work, catching up with old friends, getting into a new hobby, sitting down to write, teaching your children something you wish you had grown up experiencing, planning out a fun vacation, sharpening that skill you’ve been sitting on…we all have things we want to kickstart which haven’t quite gotten the air they need to sail into the skies of our life. To be honest, maybe we feel more like the Wright Brothers than we are comfortable with; repeated takeoffs full of promise for what we want which never seem to make it far enough off the ground.
I heard this idea expressed once as 1,000 false starts — that everyone has a few things in life that they’ve crashed and burned on over and over and over again. I have yet to meet anyone this isn’t true for. For some it’s relational; every time they try and ramp up something social it doesn’t sprout wings. Others nosedive into the ground time and again when it comes to habits or personal ventures. But at some level, this idea is true for all of us because we are all human. We are all flawed, broken, and missing pieces to our engines. And, on top of that, we are creatures of limited willpower pulled in many different directions at once and tempted daily to spend our energies in ways counter to our deepest desires.
And sometimes, if we are still being brutally honest, life seems to work against the future we are trying to create. What we want is challenged or thwarted. We find what we long for inexplicably fail or teeter on the edge of ruin, seemingly without reason.
