It’s been said that you can take the boy out of skateboarding, but you can’t take the skateboarding out of the boy. At 37 years old, I still love watching kids skate because I knew how much fun I had when I did it.
Periodically, I will stop by the local shop and see what’s new in the culture; I find skateboard culture fascinating because each person has a different way of expressing themselves and no two people will be the same. I usually like to pick up the local skate magazines because the artwork is really raw, as is the expression, and the photography is usually on par with those who make a living out of doing it professionally.
Today, I picked up a magazine called Focus which seems to center around Florida happenings and is almost on-par with bigger mags such as Thrasher or Transworld (without all of the annoying ads). Something in this month’s issue really got my attention because it made so much sense to me that I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it sooner; it was the philosophy of “failing forward.”
We all know the term “pay it forward”: that means that you help the next person out down the line if you were indeed helped, and so on and so forth. The idea of “failing forward” is succinctly described by Justin Heister:
Fail forward? Yes, what I mean is, if you can take something away from these failures or missteps, such as a lesson learned, a new perspective, a different outlook, an alternative way to approach the situation should it rise again, and positively apply it in your life, well my friend you’ve failed forward.
Justin elaborates on this theme by applying it to the art of skateboarding:
If you realize it or not, each time you roll up to that edge of the stairs and skid to a stop before the edge, or jump down without popping the tail, leaving your board at the run-up, you’ve failed. Every attempt that you slip out of a grind, catch a flip-trick upside down, or come up a little short on that gap, you’ve failed again. You might not look at it like that. You might just see it as progression, getting closer and closer to landing that trick, but that’s what it is exactly what failing forward is. Making those adjustments so the next time the results are in your favor. From your failure, you now know you rolled up too slow, speed it up a little. You had a little too much weight on your back foot on that grind, even it out a tad and stay a little more centered. Tada! You’re not successful in your original endeavor despite failing along the way. You didn’t give up, you learned from the mistake and you’ve now succeeded.
When one gets older, failure seems more and more scary, because if you’re a parent or spouse, the failure can affect more than just yourself. You cannot be reckless in your decisions, and sometimes, you have to travel a safer road. The hangup with this thinking is that some (including me) develop a mentality of always taking the perceived “safer route” each time a decision is to be made. It’s easy to fall into the rut of ditching the interesting parts of one’s personality in favor for what we think we ought to be: the responsible father, the dependable husband, a pillar of the community. What you teach yourself is that your life is over once you’re put in that position and soon everything becomes boring and drab. Soon, your self-imposed “law” starts getting the best of you and you find yourself taking your frustration out on the people who you love the most–your family.
What I’ve found in my lifetime is that taking the safer route in life wins you no rewards, and more importantly, not living your life to the fullest only leads to a myriad of issues. How can you tell your children to go out and conquer the world if they see that you haven’t even attempted to do it yourself? How does your spouse view you if you’ve allowed life to monotonously drift day-to-day and not grab it by the tail? Excitement is what fuels relationships and no one goes out looking for the person who seems to be a safe bet.
The fear of failure can cripple a relationship to the point of it ending entirely. No spouse wants to sit by and watch the person they love grow frustrated at all of the opportunities that have slipped by them because they were afraid of failure. Eventually, NOT trying to seize the day will lead to failure because avoiding the issue of it entirely will only invite it to your front door and you’ll be greeted with the knocking.
We must be flexible and willing to accept change no matter how hard it may be. We won’t succeed at everything we do but the experience of failure will give us wisdom and eventually we can pass that on to our children. Our kids mustn’t be afraid to fail, or fall down, because no progress can be made if they don’t try.
