It’s a terrible thing when we are afraid to fail. When we become subconscious, and fearful, and worried about the shame of making a mistake. When in truth, we all realise that’s how we learn, how we evolve and how we are creative.
Sir Ken Robinson says in the midst of his brilliant Ted Talk, “What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go. Am I right? They’re not frightened of being wrong. Now, I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original — if you’re not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.”
What we should be placing our attention on is building our resilience to that fear, any deep seated subconscious shame of being wrong, and dealing with our capacity to work and live without caring what other people think.
If you are not already one of the almost 62 million people that have watched this Ted Talk, you can see the brilliant Sir Ken Robinson here.
Written with love,
Jac x
L E T T E R from Jac – Welcoming Mistakes
