When failure doesn't exist
Bournemouth, 2025
When I was travelling in Bournemouth, I enjoyed watching the people who surfed for almost an hour.
They waited for the next big wave and tried to surf. Sometimes they could stand up and surf for a few seconds until they fell into the water. That didn't stop them but they kept waiting for more opportunities and did the same thing.
You can say they have failed so many times but so what? Did the "failure" greatly impact on them? Unless they keep thinking they are losers on their hand and feeling ashamed. When I was watching them, I imagined their peak focus – just trying with their hands and legs only.
Most people, including me, are deeply rooted in the idea of labelling what we or others are doing as success vs failure, and even worse, attempting to predict possibilities, mostly, that “it doesn’t work”. We learn from our childhood through a series of examinations, and we are still reminded through successful cases on social media and work (and we compare ourselves with others). We don’t acknowledge we have gradually developed learned helplessness because we consider ourselves that we are still able to forecast many things (without being aware we never predict “it’s possible”).
Something impossible at this moment doesn’t work something can’t work. It needs a lot of time, patience as well as trial and error. A quick learner is not necessarily better than a slow learner probably because the latter is more able to deep dive everything and thus becomes an expert. Being fast is not the only king.
Besides learned helplessness, we have been taught since schooling to focus on the future (planning, grabbing as many chances in front of us as possible in order to not missing) and the past (especially our mistakes to avoid repeating them in the future) rather than “here and now”. The major problem is that we will easily fall into the trap of worrying and find it more difficult to simply do and even enjoy something right now. We do miss the opportunity to understand ourselves especially what we have, but we just think what we are lacking at this moment.
We know we are worrying, and thus try to doing some evaluations (calculations) and seeking others’ advice to make us have a sense of being rational and careful with the belief of minimising possible losses and risks. Unfortunately, it’s a trap so we will never be comfortable with our life.
But we needn't learn to coexist with the possible risks, difficulties and failures. We just need to forget their existence, not verbally ordering ourselves but simply shift our focus to here and now with our own pace. Take surfing as an example, what surfers should do is to pay attention to the (change in) surrounding environments, interact with them, and the feedbacks of their experience, which are already sufficient for them to further improve.
That's why most of the time we don't need to avoid the so-called failure in every attempt. It's a kind of unnecessary distraction which makes us miserable. We need to get rid of the judgments of success vs failure and rather believe we are creating things and gaining experiences all the time. No one is a loser.
“Don’t dream it’s over.”
