Years of Conditioning (bad education)

I‘ve had a long day. This year has been a really long, tough year. A year of growth and challenges (good ones). And I’m exhausted.

So forgive me as I attempt to articulate a relatively disjointed and off-the-cuff thought at 1am…

As I was driving across town on the freeway tonite – making my way home – I began reflecting on what I’m trying to do in this chapter of my life. As I’ve set out to be an entrepreneur over the course of the last three years, I’ve studied the ideas shared by many brilliant entrepreneurs who have gone before me. One of the most impressive ideas I’ve picked up during this study is the idea of failure.

The reality in life is that you fail 100 times over for every success you have. That being the case, it really should not be that big of a deal. Yet failure hits our hearts so hard. We’re terrified of it. We do everything we can to avoid it when it’s utterly unavoidable. We experience constant anxiety about our work (which is the emotion of experiencing failure before it even happens – a hopelessly absurd state of mind), worried that the others we work with will come to think we’re totally incompetent if we don’t deliver an A+.

This comes from years of conditioning in school. The education system punished our failures, when it should do the exact opposite. It should reward us for our failure, for when you fail that is when you truly learn. The education system should teach us how to handle failure, and how to work through it. The education system should teach us that failure is not the issue, it’s your character, and what you do post failure that counts.

Failure is a fact of life. You’re simply going to fail more than you succeed. But education conditions you for the exact opposite of reality. And in the process robs you of a true education.

It’s time for a reformation.

//stinson

Tagged as: Commentary, education, entrepreneur, failure