Homework 7
āThe master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.ā -Stephen McCranie Ā
Is that quote cliche? Yeah. Is it true? Also yeah. Did I have to google this quote because I had no clue who said it? Yeah again. Failure is an inescapable part of the process of growing, whether itās your failure or somebody elseās that youāre learning from. Drafting, which is absolutely essential to pretty much every kind of writing, is an extended process of failing in a particular direction until you flop onto either the goal you set out for or a more fitting goal you chose on the way there.
I feel like āfailureā also gets a particularly bad connotation. Which... understandable. But it seems a bit overblown. Failure is a learning process, which would be way easier to believe and be comfortable with if every educational institution, job prospector, corporation, and tv show in the entire world wasnāt constantly screaming that even a single failure may ruin your life and sow salt in your fields and murder your firstborn. Failure is something we are conditioned to avoid like the plague, which makes sense to an extent, but it causes real harm to people when they do inevitably fail and instead of knowing how to bounce back and try again, they only are drowned in a feeling of worthlessness.
As somebody who has failed relentlessly for like a lot of reasons in most aspects of my life at least once, I can confidently say I wish some of those hadnāt happened, thanks. I have learned a lot from doing so, but nothing Iāve learned has been more important than this; itās only really a failure if you donāt get up and keep going afterwards.
