Imagination

The human imagination is a beautiful thing.  It is simultaneously one of the most wondrous things in existence and one of the most horrifying things.  When we think of imagination we tend to think of dreams and fantasy worlds that we create.  We tend not to think of the fact that our imagination fills in the gaps whenever there is an unknown, in every part of our lives good and bad.  That imagination can be an incredible resource that we can harness and use for creativity, it can also be one of the hardest stumbling blocks to get around in life.

Whenever it comes to setting goals in life, however big or small, becoming President, or going to the shop to buy bread, we think about what we want to achieve, and how we can do it.  It's easy to think of the things that are hard to achieve and justify the imagination when it comes up with a million reasons why we could never actually achieve it - we've already to an extent resigned ourselves to that outcome, so we don't fight it, and don't see the fact that we don't resist as something bad.  When it comes to smaller goals though, things which we can achieve, which we know we can, in these situations the imagination can dream up a million more reasons why we can't achieve these goals either.  If we resign ourselves to that outcome too then start to create a problem where we don't live our lives because of all the ways things can go wrong.

How do you overcome this obstacle then?  Well for me personally the only way that ever worked for me was to deny myself the thought in the first place.  In other words I think of what I want to achieve, and then try not to think about it at all, and just act impulsively.  That can go very well, or it can go very badly, but even when it goes badly, there is a comfort in knowing that I didn't think it through, so there's less responsibility attached to that mistake.  This can be seen as negative, and to be honest it probably is, but it's the only way I know how to overcome that desire to over think, because if I let myself think about it too much, I will convince myself not to do it, and that I know is destructive for a fact because during times of depression I can find it near impossible to get out of bed in the morning because I convince myself there's absolutely no reason to do so.

The fear of failure can deny us many experiences in life, but the only true failure is the failure to try.  If you try and you don't succeed, at the very least you gain experience, you find out what does not work, you find out what went wrong, and that can be an opportunity to change and crucially, the opportunity to learn.

You could not walk when you were born.  You could not talk.  You could not feed yourself.  You had to be taught how to hold a spoon.  You had to learn the most primitive things in life starting with no understanding and no experience whatsoever.  The fear of failure gains its greatest amount of power and control over you when it succeeds in convincing you of the lie that you must succeed the first time round.  There's very few things in life you could do the first time you tried to do it.  The first painting by the greatest artists, the first piece of writing by the most prolific authors, the first program by the world's foremost programmers, all of these things would have been simple, and likely things that they would have little desire to share.  The first painting I ever did was probably a finger painting.  The first thing I ever wrote was a story about an abandoned alien colony that had a plot that never went anywhere, 99% of the writing was dialogue.  The first program I ever wrote in BASIC was one that drew a house using five squares, a triangle, and a circle.

Life is about discovery and exploration.  Discovering all the world has to offer, and exploration of what we can contribute, even if that contribution is intended for no-one else but ourselves.  The only real failure in life is to give up trying.  It doesn't matter how many mistakes you make, or how good or bad you think your work is, that's not the point.  The point is that the more you try and the more you learn from your mistakes, the greater you can become.