Don’t be afraid. We all feel fear at times, but we should not let it consume us. Things will go right, and things will go wrong. Some things will seem good, and others will seem bad; but is anything really good or bad? We live in the land of polarity. We live in a flow of positive and negative energies. We must be strong enough to live life fully, to expand our awareness, and to gain the most from our experience. It’s important to understand that fear and failure are prerequisites to success. I will explain what this means, but first, we must define success.
Success can be defined many ways, depending on the person describing it; however, no matter what we think it means, it just means one thing — living life to the fullest so when we draw our last breath, we can look back on our lives and know that we lived, loved, and left behind something good for others. The 13th century Persian poet, Rumi, wrote this: “If a king has sent you into a far and distant land with one specific task to accomplish, you could accomplish 100 other things, but if you fail to accomplish the one thing for which you have been sent, in the end, it will be as if you have accomplished nothing.” We instinctively feel that we have a purpose for being here. We get to decide what we do with our time. We can accomplish 100’s of things, as Rumi explains; however, we will either have a nagging feeling of discontent, or a longing to do something more, until we discover the one specific task. Success then, is living our lives in such a way that we listen to our longings and our discontent, and we follow those desires, which will lead us to living more fulfilling lives — and ultimately the one thing, our purpose.
Like I said, fear and failure will be a part of our experience. We can’t avoid fear. If we try to hide from it, we are hiding because of fear. We can’t avoid failure. If we do nothing, we are failing at finding the one thing.
Let’s talk about fear of failure. When we pursue our passions, we will not do it perfectly. Just as we learned to walk by falling down, we must learn to master our craft, whatever it is, by doing some things wrong. Be strong enough to get back up. It might help to repattern our thoughts about what failure is. Edison was asked how he had 10,000 failures, yet it didn’t stop him from bringing light to civilization in the form of the light bulb. He responded that he had never had a failure, he simply had feedback. For some reason we think of failure as something bad. The truth is when we get outside of our comfort zones and do something new, we are going to be unskillful at it. Just as we learn to walk by falling down when we were babies, the same is true with success. We learn from our failure. You’ve probably heard that it’s not how many times we fall down, it’s how many times we get back up. The next time we get up might be all it takes. Sometimes we just have to pick up the pieces and begin again. To succeed we want to befriend fear, or just notice it; and recognize that it is simply part of the growth process.
In the story Three Feet from Gold by Napoleon Hill, there are several messages. One lesson is that we shouldn’t give up too soon when we have a strong desire to accomplish something — we don’t want to quit when we’re faced with temporary defeat. Another message is that sometimes we need to step back and ask a better question. Darby would’ve found the treasure he was seeking if he had stepped back and asked himself, “What am I doing wrong?” or “What can I do differently to get better results?” He could’ve discovered the fault line and simply moved over three feet to find the treasure he desired.
I want to point out that you could say that was a failure of Darby’s, but was it? Even today we are learning lessons from his experience. He also received the feedback from that experience, and he applied it to all of his future endeavors.
We want to be strong enough to live our lives to the fullest. We want to listen to our longings and our discontent. We want to follow our strongest desires so that when the day comes and we draw our last breath, we will know that we lived, we loved, and we left behind something good for others.
Lost and Finding Joy 
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