I hate the word failure.
I hate the word failure. Not because the word itself is necessarily negative. The word failure says a lot about our culture, and what we value in it.
Failure is not even about success. It’s about our ideas of success being fueled by a very dangerous idea: perfectionism. In the east, to be perfect is to constantly be in progress. Perfection is about evolution. it’s about growth, learning and unlearning. It’s the -ism that I want to be dealing with today.
Once we take an idea, and abstract idea, and we create rules about that abstract idea, we create dogma. It goes from simply being a belief about an experience into a rule about how that experience should be felt, interacted with, and ultimately, how that pattern should then be used to measure our growth.
Remember, entrepreneur is not about your product, or your idea, entrepreneurship is all about you. And if you are a dogmatic person, then your product, and your measurement of success around that product will also represent what you believe about reality.
If life is something that should always be measured, then you’re going to create a product that should always be measured by something outside of yourself. This is the problem with perfectionism, and approaching entrepreneurship, innovation, creativity as if it is something that should be measured against some sort of socially identifiable rubric.
Creativity should never be measured by anything. It should just be what it is. We constantly use the idea of Thomas Edison failing 2000 times when it came to the light bulb.
I think this is an awful way to interpret his interaction with his desires and passions. It wasn’t 2000 ways to fail. It was 2000 ways in which creativity reinvented itself.
If personal growth is defined by an Eastern perspective on perfection, entrepreneurship should follow the same path. So should creativity and innovation.
Meaning, when we look at an idea, no matter how underdeveloped it might seem, it is simply another form of creativity and innovation incarnating itself through you, and through your thought processes.
