I heard that sentence echoed by coaches, parents and professors my whole life, but only kind-of believed it until failure finally found me.

I’ve screwed up, over and over, in grand fashion, and I’m not done yet.

 

These aren’t little screw-ups we’re talking about either, like losing a game.

Here’s a snapshot of my hottest fail streak. During a one-month span during senior year of college I was first fired from an internship I wasn’t even paid for, then canned from the waiter job I was barely paid for because I went home to fix my car, which broke down because I didn’t take care of it. A week later I caused a house fire trying to barbecue a steak on a windy day . These events all occurred in the wake of my student organization, a very large fraternity I was president of, being kicked off campus by the Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs only months after I spent more than a year failing to lead its members.

But let me ask you something.

Do you want to be on the table when your surgeon deals with an emergency for the first time?

Do you want to be a stockholder when a company gets their first taste of losing money?

Or even on a sappy personal level, do you want to be the first one to break someone’s heart?

Systematically avoiding failure is far more toxic than failing itself. There’s an extremely vital lesson learned in losing that we tend to chronically avoid out of fear. And the prices we pay — infinite boredom and feeling stuck, just to name a few — are a silent plague.

Ever feel like something’s missing, but you can’t quite put your finger on it? You got your bills paid, a good dog, a decent job and food in the fridge, but something’s just off?

Go fail at something.