Fail Better

When I was a little kid we lived in Virginia Beach. On the weekends we would often go through the tunnel and head back to Portsmouth, where my father's people lived, for family visits. For the length of the tunnel ride, my dad would yell, "Don't open those windows kids, if you do the water will come in!" I was terrified. I thought we were driving through water and our life depended on quickly plowing through it in our Chevy before our oxygen ran our or we sprung a leak. It turns out, I was also wrong about that tunnel. It was keeping the water out, not providing a mysterious passage via underwater travel in a Chevy.

Much of my life has been spent searching for the "right" belief system, the "correct" way to behave, the "best practice" for whatever project I undertook. I was wrong. I had it all backwards.

Growth, change, transformation - none of that stuff that I value so very much - is achieved through getting stuff right. I have fired myself from my endless search for the right answers in favor of what is turning out to be a ton more fun - wading through all the ways I am wrong, acknowledge it, embrace it and learn from it. If we can find a way to use our mistakes to make a few less mistakes tomorrow - we are growing!

Where is your tunnel-full-of-water leading you astray? Where is your endless search for improvement really taking you? What about if we all could get a bit more excited about noticing what we don't know, what we've gotten wrong, what we've failed at....and how that can help us learn something new, do something a little less wrong tomorrow, fail better?