The Price of Entry

About a year ago, I took my daughter to a Devils game.  To be honest, she didn’t seem overly interested in the game.  It appeared that she was more excited by the cotton candy and Devil horns.  I was extremely surprised when she said at the end of the game “I want to play hockey.”  At that point we had only taken her ice skating a handful of times.  I told her that I fully supported the idea of her playing hockey but that there were some steps she needed to go through first.  She needed to spend this winter improving her skating and starting to learn how to play the game.  This past weekend she had her first hockey tournament.

This is not a story about some miraculous discovery of talent that blossomed over the past year.  My daughter spends a large amount of time on the ice.  Literally, she falls down more than anyone on her team, usually during the handshakes at the end of the game.  Her team lost all of their games this past weekend by an average margin of over 10 goals.  They did not score once.  I loved every minute watching her play!  Not because she played great, she didn’t.  Not because she gave it everything she had, she didn’t.  I loved it because she went out there to pay the price of entry: FAILURE.

This is the thing that stops most people.  They don’t want to feel bad or look foolish, so they move on quickly from things that invite failure into their lives.  The truth is that failure is the “ante” that we all must put in to play the poker games of life.  We must risk failure in order to play.  It’s unfortunate that we’ve become so completely risk averse that people don’t want to play unless they’re guaranteed to win.  The joy in a “for sure” victory is relatively hollow.  It is only in those times where we truly risk failure that we are living fully.  Taking the chance to learn from missteps, blunders and shortcomings is a major ingredient of later success.  The leap is a prerequisite.

So as you go out into the world today and do whatever it is that makes you feel alive, do it with the joy of a 9 year old girl.  One who had such a big smile on her face most of the weekend that no one would have ever known her team lost by large margins.  I do not believe that you should want to fail.  I just believe that you should be willing to RISK IT!

Fail forward!

Pete