Every new year, some of us friends gang up in someone’s house and spend the night out (31st night). We play games, talk, dance, watch movies and indulge in “intellectual” talk.
This year, we all ganged up at my place. We played a few games, got people to dance in couples, danced in groups, had good food together and generally had a good time with each other. Late in the night, we all watched a couple of episodes (Nosedive & Playtest) of Black Mirror together and reflected our own addiction to social media, ratings and inner-fears. As we were talking about it – there was one bit of analogy that Kowshik shared which really hit me hard (I am paraphrasing what he said):-
“It always puzzled me as to why people get so scared of walking on a 4 feet tall wall. Until I realized that people aren’t scared of the height of the wall, they are scared of what will happen to them if they fall. They don’t know what it feels like when they fall from 4 feet, they imagine it will damage their bodies as much as a 1000 feet fall would. If they “knew” that falling from 4 feet wont destroy their bodies, they wont sweat so much. I know people who have fallen from 30 feet and lived fit and healty. It is surprising how much beating the body can take!”
It hit me hard because I play a lot of things safe in my life – because I confuse the “impact of failing” in those things to be as severe as “impact of falling face down from 1000 feet”. Over the last few years, I haven’t even bootstrapped several activities that I intended to simply because I cant deal with the failure that may come along from simply trying. None of those failures (if they happened) are “falling from 1000 feet” types. Its just that I haven’t indulged in enough “fall-from-4-feet-tall-wall” activities to know that “it will be Ok” (TM). For me falling from 4 feet is same as falling from 1000 feet. So, I would rather not even try.
I say – 2017 will be about trying things out. Falling from 4 feet walls, if you will. My new year resolution is to simply get more comfortable failing – by trying out lots of things.