Failure

Here's a confession. It's going to sound completely, absolutely, batshit insane, but I'm 100% serious.

I need to fail.

See, I hate failing. Which is not, I think, very unusual! But for me there are two problems with it.

1. I avoid things with a medium/high risk of failure
2. I don't know how to handle failing

Neither of which is an optimal condition.

I'm 23 right now. I've got one year of my undergraduate degree left, after which I'm hoping to move on to a master's degree. On the one hand, I'm only 23, I've got the rest of my life to learn how to fail. On the other hand, though, I've only got one year in my undergrad left and the stakes only get higher from here. So... now's the time to start.

Why am I doing this? Why not keep going in the way I have been, where I'm very rarely truly challenged and can pretty much coast?

At the risk of souding trite, that won't last forever. Sooner or later I'm going to hit a wall, and I'd like to have some skills to deal with it before that happens. There's a wonderful article here in PDF form that talks about stupidity in scientific research: if you're not feeling stupid, you're not learning. And E. O. Wilson, naturalist extraordinaire, wrote that there is no satisfaction in treading the exact same paths to knowledge that's been well-worn. You have to strike out on a new path and figure some stuff out. In his words, "don't march towards the sound of the fray. March away from the fray and, while you're at it, consider making your own fray." (Not a verbatim quote. It's been a bit since I read that book.)

I desperately want to strike out and figure some stuff out. But my current self-image is based largely in maintaining my feeling and appearance of competence, and that is threatened by failure. However, it also means that I constantly feel like I'm a poseur, I've just got people fooled, they'll figure out soon that I'm not really capable of great things. What's the solution to this? There's probably a few, to be fully honest. The one I'm going for is learning how to fail. And, unfortunately for me as of right now, the only way to do that is to fail over and over.

I've talked with Mike about pushing me to failure. I hate the thought, because I don't want to disappoint him by failing or giving up, and I'm so invested in being competent that I can't properly conceptualize any other reaction than pure disappointment.