If we stopped regretting our past screw-ups and invested that time improving, would we move on faster?
You bet.
Not only faster, but smarter, and more compassionately. The moment you decide to bypass guilt and replace it with the excitement of changing, a huge window opens and you feel compelled to spread the virus.
Since 10 years, I’ve been experimenting with various tools to leverage failure instead of sinking in it, I won’t claim my training is over but I found a few approaches that work great, in particular Fail Fast Forward. It’s a process that doesn’t take much, just three steps to repeat constantly.
If you’d like to try it for yourself, here’s the method:
- Fail: when you fail, just face it. At least you honestly tried this time.
- Fast: making a mistake is not a reason to dwell on self-blame. Guilt is for those who live eternally, you won’t. Move on.
- Forward: how can you make it better now? Would it be OK to do it…differently?
Faced with a choice between stagnation and evolution, we often choose the comfort of immobility, no matter how depressing and inappropriate that place might be. Motionlessness is a ham-fisted attempt at reaching contentment. In fact it’s unacceptable.
Changing, on the other hand is costly and totally painful, you don’t have to. But there’s a Japanese saying for that: “We are fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.”