When we confuse process with result

Here's the scenario: you decide to spring clean your closet / hall cupboard / stationery store. You pull everything out to see what's in there, and have it all spread over every available surface at the point where your blood sugar falls through the floor or you're called away to another task. It all starts to feel pointless and counterproductive. You shove it all back in, any old how, and mentally curse yourself for being such a slob that even when you're trying to clean up you're still only making a bigger mess.

Congratulations, you've confused the process with the result. The result is a tidy and organised closet / hall cupboard / stationery store. The process is chaotic and appears disorganised. (People never believe that random looking piles of stuff are a form of order.)

Our new fitness regime is likely to suffer a similar fate. We don't feel (or look) trim, taut, energetic and terrific when we exercise, so when we hit our lowest ebb, we wonder 'what's the point?' We're confusing the result with the process.

Take this human tendency into the field of human relationships and you just know its going to go kablooey.

Can you see this pattern at work anywhere in your life?

Oops.

Well, that was my shortest New Year's Resolution ever!  My apologies to you for missing my first deadline.  (I guess the editors of the TLS and the NYT won't be calling after all.)

The best way to overcome a fear of failure is to "fail early and fail well", so they say.  Having missed my first deadline, I have done that, and now have no reason to miss any others throughout the year.

In retrospect, my birthday was not the most auspicious day for writing an article - even a short one! Between the well-wishers, the partying, and the search for a gift for my twin (whose birthday it was too, naturally) I didn't leave enough time.

What I won't do, is say, "Oh look, you've failed.  You mucked it up.  Why did you even begin to think you could do this?"  I don't know about you, but that's the little voice of criticism that whispers in my ear any time I do something new.  I know it's not just me, because many of my students suffer from this nasty little internal voice too.

Whenever we start something new, we face a barrage (well, a trickle, at least) of nay-sayers. We're too old, too young, too busy, to immature, too flighty, too ambitious, too over-confident, too lazy, or too thick to succeed in our new enterprise.  Sometimes the nay-saying is from our nearest and dearest, and is done out of love and concern.  Our loved-ones don't want to see us hurt.  Most of the negative vibes come from inside ourselves.

It can be very liberating to keep going in spite of this.  Take stock of the risks, decide if it is worth it, then try.  I don't like the phrase, "Failure is not an option".  In most of everyday life, that doesn't come up.  Being willing to fail is the only way to get from here to there.

Beyond failure, when it comes to creative endeavours, we have to be willing to be average... or even 'no good'... at something.  Before good art or craft (music, writing, painting, woodwork, you name it) there is always a stage of bad art.  Sometimes that is the highest stage we'll get to.  For myself, I would rather make 'bad' art with joy than no art at all.

So, as we emerge into 2009, my question is, what would you do if you were willing to fail or be "no good" at it?

Let's all get cracking.