Fail Fast

So why aren’t you doing your Dream of the Week? 

My last post, Getting Started, sounded very basic, very simple; that’s because it is. It is my goal to break down every single excuse you have, so that by the end you have no choice but to just go out and f***ing do it, whatever your Dream of the Week may be.  

Why aren’t you doing your Dream of the Week? Think about it for a moment. Are you worried about failure? Success? The unknown? Money? I know that the list can be endless.

For the remainder of this post, I would like to discuss the concept of failure. 

Failure is great! Start thinking about it like that from now on. Don’t worry about sounding like an idiot, being publicly shamed, (though that is difficult to recover from), or any other concern attached to failure. Remember, what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. Don’t be afraid to fail. 

In the climbing world, when we're training we say “Go to failure.” We go until we literally fall off the climb. We are trying to destroy our muscles, so that they will rebuild themselves, so that we’ll get stronger.

It is imperative that you start viewing the world in such a manner.

"Fail fast" is a saying one of my professors, Christopher Allen, introduced me to recently. And I like it for the same reason. Get yourself out in the world, and keep learning, keep revising. Get up and try again and again. Try something new. In a sense, we are rapid prototyping our lives.

In the grand scheme of things, we don’t have that much time to waste doing things that we hate, and there are simply too many cool things to do. Which ones to choose? Try them all. Start small, you’ll figure out which ones you want to do.
 
This last year, I wanted to grow wheat. I mean, why not? I enjoy working hard, I like working outside, and quite frankly, I just wanted to see if I could do it. While I tend to want to go big or go home, sometimes it’s smarter to start small and keep it manageable your first time out, whatever it is you want to do. You don’t always have to jump in head first. It’s okay to test the water to see if you like it.

So I planted a 20 foot by 10 foot patch of wheat in my front yard. I figured I could handle that pretty easily. But in order to feed my desire for more, I also planted oats and barley in patches of the same size. Again, Why not, right? I had the space, and I was already growing the wheat, I may as well.
As it came to harvest time, the wheat did not perform well. It was a terrible spring, really cold and wet. But the oats and barley were amazing. We harvested them and I am now  officially a (small scale) grain farmer. 

I like this example because it shows that you don’t have to make a huge life change to do what you want to do. That you can fail fast, and be successful. Whatever your Dream of the Week is, just start by testing the water.

 

This is a photograph of me, sitting in front of my very successful barley. Thanks to Sadie Williams Photography for capturing the moment!