It’s All Just Information

Trying something new is terrifying.

There’s the obvious fear of failure. But also embarrassment, irreversible damage and whatever outlandish circumstances our brains can come up with to convince us not to try it.

The other day I was talking to a friend about being nervous something wouldn’t go well and she shrugged and said, “It’s not really a failure. It’s just information.”

And what a beautiful way to think about trying something new. If we’ve never done it before - we have no data points about what the outcome could be. We can speculate and daydream about massive success or embarrassing failure, but we don’t actually know what it will turn out like no matter what.

But once we try it? We have that information.

It reminds me of being in college. I was the nerdiest and double majoring in Psychology and Creative Writing with a minor in French. I LOVED school. And I wanted to take every class. But the reactions I got every time I was asked about my major were, “What are you going to do with that?”

Words designed to jump start a quarter life crisis.

So I decided I would go to Law School. It felt like a respectable place to end up after college and a great reason to excuse away horrified strangers who were worried I was spending thousands of dollars to train myself fo absolutely nothing.

So junior year I took an LSAT prep class, organized all my letters of recommendation and started studying things like “Symbolic Logic” and standardized test hacking so I could ace that test.

In the spring was the big day for the LSAT test - hundreds of us crammed into one tiny business school classroom a 10 minute walk from my house. I wasn’t nervous. I was READY. It’s what I had been preparing for and talking about for years. It was a non-event. I barely even remember being in that room.

But what I do remember was walking out of that building. Hours later, a sense of accomplishment and a push through the double doors from the cinderblock hallway to the bright sunny outdoors. It HIT me so clearly.

Thank God that’s over and there’s no way I’m going to law school.

I just simply didn’t want to. The feeling wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t accompanied by the dread of wasted time or the not knowing what to do next - it was just a fact. I did not want to go to law school.

All that money spent and time prepping for that test was completely well spent - because it gave me that information. That is closure I could have only gotten from completing an action and reflecting on that feeling.

I didn’t think about that as a way of getting information back then. But now that I’ve started my own business, I’m trying something new every single day. And I crave that kind of information. The information I can only get from ACTION.

Without that information - it would be wildly unclear what to do next. I would be lost.

So we can’t be afraid of failure more than we are hungry for that ACTION.

Action gives us the information we need to take the next step. And even if it is a massive failure? Well the way you feel about that is just information too.