When I started writing this yesterday morning I had a sense of space, of light in my chest. It is so spectacular how the moments, the world, can change in half a second. Not that life is any worse but I just feel there is more to say now. Now isn’t that remarkable?
To fail or not.
This morning we spent a couple hours talking about risk taking, about allowing ourselves to fail big, or small. Coming into this I knew I had a lot to learn. If I played safe, stayed within my box I would literally be screwed. Not only would I likely not make it through the first few weeks of class but I would come out the other end, if possible, in the exact same position as when I went in… just with a whole lot of debt and two years behind on the corporate ladder.
This process wouldn’t work for me. For others in my class, this is their reality. One of my classmates brought up that he was so afraid of failing in any capacity, he was afraid of “wasting $40 000+ in tuition”, that he was unwaveringly unwilling to deviate from anything he considered his strengths. He simply saw anything else a slight possibility to fail and therefore not acceptable. He stated that in this program we were simply not allowed to fail.
I sat in a room with 110 people in utter disbelief. I felt the exact opposite way. I felt that if I did not risk failure daily that first, I was wasting every penny in tuition, lost salary, living expenses, text books and Thursday night bar tabs and second, that taking these risks enabled me to grow and learn more than I thought possible. Without these risks I was not going to get through the program. I wasn’t going to get what I could out of this. Risking brilliant failure is the only option I can see.
Part of why this works is the what I’ve learned from these risks. If you had asked me in July to take the derivative of a function I would have laughed. Had you asked me whether I would prefer a smaller or larger contribution margin I likely would have given you a blank stare. What is a value proposition? Divergent and convergent thinking? What a venture capital firm really does? Well… none of these things seemed an easy application of my strengths but by putting it out there, learning, relying on my friends and teammates I have made leaps and bounds. So much in fact that I hardly recognize where I came from.
So what now? Today was long, the extra school day tacked onto the end of a long week, preceding a work packed weekend, preceding an even busier week. My life of ungrounded extremes catching up to me in full force. I am tired. Exhausted really. Getting what I can only hope is the flu so I can just go to shoppers and Tylenol and Buckley the heck out of it. I feel overwhelmed a little and less so by the volumes of assignments and quizzes and more so by lack of sleep, nutritionally valuable food and quiet contemplative time. I felt defeated when I left school this afternoon. Funny enough it was a little facebook post by my dear girl that sparked something in me.
It is ok to be the person you want to be when everything is going right but to be that person when the stakes are high, the chips are down or any other common phrase to describe such a time, is true grace. It is courageous and to be applauded. And that’s the point really. To take risks, fail, feel crappy about the things we’ve misplaced or avoided and to strive for greatness through it all.
<3
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