From Avoiding Failure to Enjoying the Struggle

Every now and then, I try to learn a new skill. What the skill is does not really matter to me. What matters is the process itself: being bad at the beginning, second guessing myself, and continuing long enough to eventually see progress.

I do this to humble myself. We are taught early on in our life that being bad at something is a failure and something to avoid. However I personally think that’s the opposite. Being bad gives you room to make mistakes, and mistakes are where real learning happens. When I start something new, I try to learn fast and fail fast, knowing that each failed attempt teaches me a better approach.

This mindset is not just about skills, but about training the mind. If you never allow yourself to fail, you also deny yourself experiences that could meaningfully improve your life.

From my personal experience running is a recent example of this. For most of my life, I disliked running. I preferred lifting weights and thought endurance mattered less than muscle. Whenever I tried to run, it felt boring within the first few kilometres, and I would stop. That discomfort and boredom were exactly the kind of early failure I used to avoid.

Last year, after learning about the health benefits of running, better endurance and heart health, I challenged myself to approach it differently. I decided to keep going even if it felt boring and allow myself to quit only after I had genuinely tried. In the beginning, I struggled with sore legs, muscle cramps, and runs in bad weather where stopping felt like the reasonable choice. Those were the moments where the mental training happened, not the physical one.

Five months later, I can confidently say that I have learned to run and to enjoy it. I am still not where I want to be in terms of pace, but I can now run for longer periods without struggling. Looking back, it was the willingness to stay consistent on the difficult days that proved my original point: failing early, and often, did not hold me back.. it made progress possible.