My girlfriend is planning her first trip to Ireland. She’s bringing her teenaged kids along with her. She’s purchased the plane tickets, reserved the rental car, now it’s dawning on her that she’s going to have to shell out a lot more money than she’d planned on. Recently divorced, she’s understandably nervous about her finances. I can see her getting all worked up in a way I’ve never seen before. Where shall we go, she asks me, what should we see? Tell me what to do. Give me an itinerary.
Clearly, she’s forgotten who I am: a fool who thinks climbing Denali constitutes a vacation. An introvert who sits around on the couch all glassy-eyed reading books for weeks on end. Unlike her, you’d have to press a loaded gun to my head to get me to a crowded tourist spot.
I recognize the fear. She’s worried that she’s going to get this wrong. That she’ll spend thousands of dollars and either kill her family in a fiery car crash or end up wishing they’d gone to Disney instead for a fraction of the cost.
I can hear it in her voice: there’s no room for error. Mistakes are not an option. This is her one and only chance. She’s got to get it right.
I spent my whole life afraid to make a mistake, to take a wrong turn. I latched on to a man early on because I was convinced he had the map, that he’d get us both on the one right road. So sure I’d end up in the wrong place on my own, I followed him to Iran. Now that’s a neighborhood in which you might want to lock your doors.
I recognize this same fear in many of my clients. First-time book writers, they’re figuring out their message, clarifying their process, choosing the right stories to support their lessons. They’ve headed into uncharted territory, one rife with millions of tiny decisions they’ve never had to consider before. They’re excited about the possibilities, sure, but they’re far more wary of the dangers along the road. The thousand and one ways they can go off tangent for chapters on end, or inadvertently out someone that they shouldn’t, or come across as a dumb…
For those of us raised to believe that mistakes=total annihilation, sliding behind the steering wheel takes some serious guts. Being solely responsible for all those choices feels freaking daunting.
Why are we so afraid to make a mistake, to get it wrong?
What will happen if we head to Limerick, and end up in Kinsale? What will happen if we elect to see Muckross House, over Loftus Hall? Who says one option is any better than the other, anyway? Who says we won’t accidentally trip over something really cool along the way?
I trust you see this as a metaphor, not just for the whole writing process, but for life itself.
A while back I picked up a book by Atul Gawande. He’s an Indian-born doctor who talks a lot about failure and mistakes—in life and in medicine—and about innovation. Innovation that arises out of risk-taking. His thesis: if you don’t make mistakes, you never grow and improve.
For someone terrified of making the wrong move, this was some interesting news.
In a commencement addresses at Williams college, he said this:
We do in fact want people to take risks, to strive for difficult goals even when the possibility of failure looms. Progress cannot happen otherwise… But in the end, risk is necessary. Things can and will go wrong.
When things go wrong, there seem to be three main pitfalls to avoid, three ways to fail…. You could choose a wrong plan, an inadequate plan, or no plan at all. Say you’re cooking and you inadvertently set a grease pan on fire. Throwing gasoline on the fire would be a completely wrong plan. Trying to blow the fire out would be inadequate. And ignoring it—“Fire? What fire?”—would be no plan at all.
Here are the take-home points:
- Dare to take a risk. To set off into the unknown even though it might not be the “best” road.
- You can’t escape wrong turns. They’re part of life. And sometimes they lead you to a better place.
- Prepare for the possibility that things can go wrong. Set some extra money aside. Buy the appropriate guidebook. Bring along a clean pair of underwear. Ask some questions.
