How to Fail Like a Baby

If you remember nothing else from this blog post, remember this:

Be a baby.

Now, I am not insinuating that we retreat back to someone changing our diapers and being totally helpless creatures. But I do think that we can learn a lot from babies when it comes to setting, achieving, and failing at our goals.

Take walking for example. According to a 2012 study, infants aged 12-19 months fell on average 17 times per hour while learning to walk. Imagine you are setting out to learn a new skill, or achieve a goal, and you failed 17 times in a row, every hour, all day.

Would you keep going?

Understandably, the answer to that is most likely no. And yet, we all started the same way; learning to walk, falling hundreds, if not thousands of times before we got it right.

The same goes for learning to drink from a cup, learning to put on our clothes, learning to use the potty…literally every time we learned a new skill, we first had to fail over, and over, and over.

And yet, we kept going.

So what changed? Perhaps we got tired, lost our motivation, or lost track of that unbridled joy that is so characteristic of a baby, even when failing. But in my opinion, it’s not too late to get it back.

I have been thinking about this post for a while, so I spent the last several weeks observing my daughters in a new light. They are almost 2 ½ years old now, and to watch them approach a new situation is fascinating.

It happens in one of two ways:

They either approach cautiously, taking ample time to observe the situation first, and asking for support if needed:

Or they jump in enthusiastically without really giving it much thought at all:

Whichever way you approach a new experience, the bottom line is they always end up entering the situation with everything they’ve got. And no matter what, every time, they are thrilled with the results.

We do such a good job of making sure our children have new experiences as often as possible. But do we regularly give ourselves the same opportunities? When was the last time we intentionally gave ourselves a variety of new experiences, and approached them with pure joy and curiosity?

I don’t know about you, but I am ready to get out there and fail, try again, and learn something new along the way.

And as always, I leave you with this:

How can you find something new to learn, just for the sheer joy of it?