The Tragic Mistake of Thinking You Won't Fail If You Never Try

How easy it is to lie to yourself about such foundational topic, and lose years due to inaction

Here is the truth I found after years of avoiding action: The only way to fail is to never try.

Contrary to that truth I lived a life with opposite belief:
“I can’t fail if I don’t try”
Which was main reason for lack of success in my life.
And I talk about areas important to me, not getting status, but creating a family and building meaning in life.

I selected a mediocre life by never trying to improve.
And the reason was fear of failure.
I imagined all those people laughing at me, and pointing fingers at me saying that I’m worthless.
The image was so vivid that it stopped me from pursuing the things I dreamt about: finding solutions to our problems and sharing them with the world and building a family that supports it’s members during hard times.

The inaction felt safe, because it protected my ego.
I couldn’t know if I’m wise, resilient and strong, because I did nothing to proof or disprove these statements. I could still think I was all that.
While I was watching Netflix, playing Witcher 3 and drinking all the time.
And however I love video games and good movies, they’d never give me the possibility to enjoy solving problems and building a family.
All I did was play, but when I only played I felt empty.

I realized the life I wanted requires work and play.
And even better, that work should become play.

For that I had to try more, get out of my comfort zone of staying quiet and avoiding responsibility.
Luckily for me I noticed how much the inaction cost me in terms of unfulfilled ambition and attitude to life.
And inaction made me sit at home, playing games while drinking the 5th beer before going to sleep to then wake up to work, get back home and repeat the process.
Without enjoying a moment of it.

Inaction is not neutral

Not doing something is an active choice with compounding downside.

I avoided risks and I assumed not trying is risk free.
But the reality is there is always a risk. Everything has a cost.
Every decision is a trade-off.
The thing to decide on is which trade off I’m willing to make to get my destiation: fulfilling life with people I trust.
And let me tell you, not trying is not the way.

It’s not that you always have to act.

Sometimes staying where you are, sillently is your best bet.
Somethings can happen without you.
But when it comes to getting what you dont have: friends, partner, money or respect, all require effort and substantial tradeoffs.
Then you face risks, you expose yourself to humiliation.

And that’s ok.

Imagine you can become free from 9-5, able to support yourself and your family and live a good life.
And to achieve that, you’d have to call people and sell them things, or create something you believe in and count on others paying for it.
There are hundreds of ways it can go wrong, you losing money, energy or credibility.
But the gain is clear, if you want to do what you want to maximize your output by working on opportunities suited to your level while providing the level of life you want for your family, isn’t that the good trade of?

And if you won’t do what’s required, if you stay where you’re, do you think it’s risk free?

What about your attitude? Will another soul-sucking manager make you cynical enough about software development for you stop beleving in using it to help men build meaningful lives?
I think about this as a technical debt that acrues over time.
In life it becames low self-esteem.
The bigger the technical debt, the fewer opportunities I took, so I had little proof for how wise and resilient I was.

So, the key realization here was that I don’t avoid failure by not trying.
I immedietaly fail at the thing I wanted, and I also fail in the bigger game of meaningful life, because I deny trying to build it.
What I ended up with was a limbo of unfulfilled hopes and a lot of resentment to the world, women and men, for not helping me, for rejecting me, for not wanting to be me friend.
I blamed everyone and everything, but myself.

The compound interest of waiting

I mentioned this issue briefly above.

The real loss is not that one thing you decided to avoid.
One thing was never the reason for empty life I built for myself.
It’s a slow process that takes away your courage to try step by step.
Each opportunity you avoided takes a bit of you.
Each makes you less capable of dealing with the next one.

And this is the scariest cost of waiting.

You lose the resilience to face hardtime working toward a goal.
You create a split between what you think you are and what you really are.
Because if you think you’re wise, why don’t you have what you want?
What is your wisdom for?

If you think you know people, why are you alone?

I thought I was amazing, yet life proved otherwise.
And the longer I continue lying to myself, the harder it was to get out of the pit.

Inaction has also a clear mechanims of inlufencing my life negatively.

When I’m not doing what I know I should, like sending an email with complaint, because I got a wrong order, it instantiates anxiety.
Even if what I’m not doing is something I decided to avoid due to fear of failure, my mind treats as unresolved tasks.
These stay in my mind and poison it.
My brain keeps repeating them.
It’s tiring to think about all those things.
Usually more tiring than doing them, failing to achieve the goal and trying again.

Every postponed attempt trains your brain to distrust your word.

And for that reason I keep trying doing the things I’d like to avoid, because of fear.
Let’s see how it goes in practice.

How to minimize fear of trying by conducting experiments

Reframing the problem is a powerful tool that helped me countless times in my life.

I remember realizing that when I have a problem I can either focus on having it:

• complain,
• blame the world for it
• drink to drown my sorrows

or I can reframe having a problem as an opportunity to try getting better:

• how to solve the problem I have, using what I know or learn what I need to know

And surely life has ways of fucking me up when I do that.
Many times one problem became three. It’s common.
When you’re a parent, working and trying to have a sex life there are so many things that can happen to interrupt your plans.
And that’s from what I know can happen.

But reframing gives me something.

It’s not the silver-bullet, but it’s useful.
In case of failures and avoiding them, the reframe I use is experiments.
Instead of thinking of my trials as production ones, where everything has to perfect I do my best to think of them as development process.
They’re experiments on the way to the end product.
Each failure is a data point that gets me closer to the goal.

To make trying even easier, I consider smaller possible steps.
Like in Kaizen, I learned that multiple little improvements work great over the long-run.
And building a meaningful life, solving worthy problems and building a family are all long-term projects.
Not one time tasks.

To illustrate that, I’ll tell you a story about my little transformation.

I used to focus on the negative side of life.
People are lying, cheating and wasting time.
They chase status, not happiness or peace.
Everyone thinks of themselves first, and if someone says differently they’re the lying ones.
The world is nearing to an end, becasue we exploit it to satisfy our whims, not considering our future on the planet.

And all that I still see in the world, but I also see the positive side.

People being good.
Someone put stones on a body of a dead fox near my house, creating it a grave, so it can rest in peace.
Drivers around honking and waving at my son when they see him.
Mentors helping less experienced devs find their way in this AI world.

I got here by focusing on what I was grateful for. And it took my a year of small daily effort to notice the bright side of things.
That’s the power of small experiments.
They’re easy to start and over time bring enourmous benefits.

Stop waiting for a better tomorrow

Tomorrow improves only if today contains an attempt.

Before I got organized in my experiments I didn’t know what I was doing.
I had a rough direction to improve my life, but not a plan with any clear goal.
Even then I managed to get multiple lessons from trying.

To clarify, I haven’t thought about these as experiments then.
But they served the puporse well.
My actions were small, low risk and compounding over time.

Whatever came to my mind I tried.
Here is a list :

• juggling
• playing beat saber
• washing teeth with my left hand standing on one leg (I tried changing them daily, but never noted which one I staned on :D)
• writing 3 things I’m grateful for
• walking 8k steps
• talking to a family member once a week
• talking to one of my friends once a week
• reading one page a day
• writing 500 words a day (emails, texts and complaints included)
• journaling for 5 mintues
• Qigong for 10 minutes daily
• Meditate for 2 minutes daily

Each of these was a small experiment. Each was commented by friends and family. Some made them laugh, some made them impreesed. I didn’t like they laughing, but also nothing happened to me. And I felt better by trying and then opening up about that.

Since trying all these things, doing all these small experiments I learned I’m capable of much more than I’ve imagined. I became a better engineer and much better human being. I started a family and I’m builiding the life full of meaning.

And as everything I did, the process I follow is full of ups and downs. Full of doubts, but also certainty when suddenly I get clarity over why I’ve started all theses, and I did that to become better. At the beggining becasue deep down I knew how shitty person I was, now because I’m curious, how far can I get before I die?

What is there in the world I couldn’t see because I lacked understanding yesterday?
And that’s why it’s worth to try, and why not trying is failure.
I could miss all these things that only opened up to me, because I dared to try, to do something I considered impossible and proving myself in the process that I’m more than my ego thinks, and there is nothing to protect, because I’m so much bigger than ego assumes it’s not worth thinking about protecting it.