You ever see a cat just absolutely total itself trying to make a jump? What happened after? I bet the cat just stood up and continued on without even acknowledging the failure, right? We can learn a lot from cats.
This is an especially hard rule for me to follow, which is why I made sure to include it. I hate failing; I’m one of those people that after failing replays the failure over and over in my head. I need to be more like a cat.
“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.”
– Captain Picard
I believe at its core there are two reasons why I have trouble with this rule:
- I don’t fail often enough
- When I do fail, I don’t do it gracefully (I’m too hard on myself)
At some point your going to screw up and break something (maybe something big and important). You’ve probably done it a bunch of times already, but you survived and now you’re a little wiser than you were before. Fix what you broke and move on to your next failure.
Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn
– James Victore
Embrace your inner cat: fail fast, fail often, fail gracefully; failure is part of the process.
This story is part of an ongoing series diving into the origins of each of rules outlined in Octavo (My eight-fold principles of life and work). Click here to see the full set of rules and to download and print your own copy of the rules and Zine.
Octavo (8vo) is both a format and a philosophy; it is a sheet of paper folded into 8 equal sections to form a book, and it is a philosophy folded into eight principles to form the architecture of how we work and live. Keep these principles posted wherever your work is done and refer to them often. Keep the zine in your back pocket at all times and refer to it when tempted to stray. Both the principles and the zine are provided here for free and can be printed from any monochrome printer that accepts legal-sized paper. Distribute as you see fit to your friends, family, and colleagues (but do not modify).