Get addicted to failing

When I had a personal blog a few years ago I used to write articles similar to the ones I write here on Steemit. One particular article I remember I wrote was about why I left college and what made me mad about the things I was learning there. I remember I wrote it, published it and to my surprise I even received a comment.

Apparently I made a lot of grammatical mistakes in that article and someone decided to point them out, not in a nice way. One of the things that stuck with me was that guy saying "With this English, no wonder you left college". Of course, this is the short version of that comment. It made me feel really bad and I even considered giving up writing and never try again.

However, I kept doing it, learning new things and getting better at writing all kind of stuff. It was the same when I first started creating things in Photoshop. I was barely able to create a sphere, and all the filters and effects in that software seemed too hard for me to use.

But I kept learning, failing again and again, working on all kind of small and insignificant projects that I don't even have any more, asking for opinions from people I knew and after years of work I got to a level where I can create something decent in Photoshop if I take my time.

All that was possible because I wasn't afraid of failing. I knew I will suck at everything I do for the first time and the fastest way to improve was to listen to the people who had a lot more experience than me and who were willing to critique what I did.

I paid a lot of attention to all the positive and negative feedback I received and I used that to get better at what I do right now. And I strongly recommend you do the same. Get addicted to failing, get addicted to trying new things that you didn't try before and to showing your work to other people hoping for some useful feedback.

Your self esteem may suffer when you'll see people saying your work is not great, but you can always ask them why and improve hearing their opinion, especially from those who did what you do for a long time. Not being afraid of failing will offer you two things: first, it will help you gather feedback faster and improve using the tips people will give you and second, it will help you discover new opportunities that you didn't know were there.

You can write educative articles for months without considering writing something different, like fantasy, just because you know you're not really good at that and you don't want to fail. The thing is that if you allow yourself to not be good for a while and you just write, trying to get better and asking people for their opinion, you will get good in time and maybe discover that you can actually write fantasy, and you just didn't know it.

This is why I believe you should get addicted to failing and try new things again and again. If you do that enough times and with the right activities you'll discover that you're able to create things you never thought about before, just because you allowed yourself to try something new and embrace failure.