When you fall, fall hard. Learn from it and get back up.
But before you fall, try to catch yourself.
Too many artists get the two confused and try to catch themselves falling or rely on some other safety net to prevent getting hurt, to prevent failure. Don’t.
What you want to do is to catch yourself losing track of your goals, or your motivation, or swaying into oncoming traffic. To do so, you have to develop three elements to your psyche.
1. Cautiousness
2. Observation
3. Mental Risk Taking
If you’ve read any of my content before, you’re likely wondering why I am advising cautiousness. I am all for a gamble, but you need to know the consequences going into it. To be cautious is to acknowledge the potential negative consequences.
To understand a decision, you have to observe everything about it. Have other people made a similar decision? What factors may affect your choice later that are not now? What are all the pieces that need to be in place before a decision can be made effectively? Essentially, what’s changing, in constant motion and how does it affect you?
Mental risk taking means to think through the unthinkable, the impossible, to explore every avenue available. Have you ever heard someone say there are only X number of ways to do something? The obstacle of mental risk taking is to think of one more way then what has already been thought of. Better yet, think of Parkour. Ask a regular pedestrian what is the fastest route to get from A to B and they will give you directions. Ask a tracuer and they will tell you to jump over this fence, run through that lot, leap over this creek and race across the rusted bridge. Something a layperson wouldn’t.
Stay Positive & Try Not To Fall, But When You Do, Fall Hard
Garth E. Beyer
