Human Life: Failure

I need start with this: this concept just blows my mind! I'm still trying to figure out how to explain it, so please bear with me. Enjoy!

"It's not the load that breaks you down, it's how you carry it."--Lena Horne

Our society is corrupted by the idea of success. How could success, an ideally good thing, ruin our society? First, let me explain what success is. Success is the achievement of an endeavor. It can be seen in competitions, awards, and not surprisingly, pretty much everywhere. The point of this article: there is no success without failure, and failure sucks. Our world is driven by success, but what about when people fail?

In the art of improvisational theatre, instructors always tell improvisors, "It's okay to fail." As much as a I agree with this teaching method, one thing always feels wrong about someone saying this. Failure is a great learning tool, but when we keep pushing ourselves to succeed, failure is inevitable. And to be frank, failure, no matter how much you fight it, does hurt.

We all understand that failure can push us to great achievements, but what is the ultimate goal? In my own experience, I fail every moment of my life, and part of me is broken by that. We live in a world driven by success, but does that mean everyone in the car is failing? Thank you improvisation and the improv community for teaching me the way out of this sad reality: enjoying life for what it is.

Why do people do improv? Is it to win something? Is it to gain glory? Is it to release? Everyone has different reasons, but I think the richest improv to perform and watch is the improv in which the actors are just enjoying themselves. To be a great improvisor, we need let go and let our inner-child take over. We need to remember the times when everything was art.

As a child, we didn't instinctively have this idea of success, we just loved experiencing and discovering the world--and that's all that mattered! We didn't find out about what failure was until society smacked our face with it! Can we go back to that mind frame before we learned about failure? To the times of bliss and enjoying the wonders of life?

Of course, setting goals in your life is important, but what if instead of living trying to achieve something, we lived to just experience life? We need to live life like it was art. You can never master an art, but you can learn how to get better at it. In all art forms, the goal is never to be famous or to beat out the competition, it's to learn your craft and attempt to master it knowing beforehand that it is impossible--and of course, being content with that. Failure is an unfortunately inevitable part of a broken society, but is it also one of the greatest gifts? What if failure didn't exist, would we appreciate anything? Failure hurts, and our society has learned to live with it and to use it, but what if we got rid of the concept of failure? Would the results be amazing, or would they be catastrophic? I think they would be amazing. But hey, that's just my observation.

Human Life: Live life as if it was an art.

Insight: Our society is structured on success, but oddly enough, failure influences us more.