🛡️ The Cost of Playing it Safe
🕊️ Freedom From Expectations
💪 Sol Bites: 5 Ways to Be Less Afraid of Failure
🎥 Video Bite: Angelique MacArthur on How to Rebound From Failure
💬 Words of Wisdom
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The Cost of Playing it Safe
There’s a paradox running through creative work, science, and even biological evolution: Those who achieve the best results are also those most open to terrible outcomes along the way.
The logic is straightforward. The more stupid things a person is able to accept while working toward a goal, the better results they will end up getting.
It’s the complete opposite of how we usually act in a professional work environment. Who wants to deal with failure or nonsense? However, the instinct to run away from it may be killing the potential of intelligent and capable people.
Freedom From Expectations
Richard Hamming, a well-known mathematician, famously observed that people who have won Nobel prizes tend not to do good work afterward. It does not mean they no longer lack the ability. Instead, the problem is that every new idea they have will be compared to their award-winning one. They find themselves unable to meet the standards set by their previous work. Meanwhile, young and inexperienced people continue to make innovative contributions.
Did you know the average age of the Macintosh design team was 21? Most of the people working at Xerox PARC (Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center) in the 1970s were under 30. Their advantage was not their IQ or the sheer amount of energy they put forth. It was that nobody expected anything from them, allowing them to explore strange possibilities without worrying about their reputations.
Evolution provides the best example of this theory. Jellyfish have existed for more than 500 million years without brains, skeletons, or any advanced technology. However, evolution had to get there through endless failed attempts. If evolution were ashamed of its failures, it would simply stop working. The whole system relies on the ability to produce terrible results in order to create some excellent ones.
Sol Bites: 5 Ways to Be Less Afraid of Failure
If you've gotten good at something and built a reputation around it, that reputation will quietly raise your internal bar for what's worth sharing.
1) If you’re afraid to share your work with other people because you don’t think it’s your best, start by changing your goal.
Instead of pressuring yourself to only share work or ideas you think are good, make it your goal to try to share anything at all. The shift matters. When a goal is quality, you may freeze. When the goal is simply production, you move. A half-finished blog post published today beats a perfect one that never ships.
2) Lower the stakes of individual outputs.
If every piece of work carries the weight of representing your full capabilities, you'll never accomplish anything. Treat most of what you make as disposable exploration rather than a definitive statement. A silly demo, a rough sketch, or a weird side project are acorns that could grow into oak trees.
3) Practice deliberately generating bad ideas.
In meetings, in writing sessions, or while brainstorming, give yourself explicit permission to produce garbage first. The good ideas almost always emerge from the pile of bad ones, rarely from a blank page approached with reverence.
4) Pay attention to who you're targeting.
Much of the fear around looking stupid comes from an imagined audience of critics. In reality, most people aren't paying nearly as much attention as we think, and the ones who are tend to appreciate genuine attempts more than polished safety. Write, paint, perform, or do whatever it is you do for yourself first.
5) Notice when recognition starts to constrict you.
If you've gotten good at something and built a reputation around it, that reputation will quietly raise your internal bar for what's worth sharing. Catch this happening and push against it. The goal is to keep planting your acorns even when everyone expects you to deliver trees.
The real cost of playing it safe is not the missed opportunities or the lost reputation, but the gradual erosion of those parts of yourself that dared to take risks. The capacity to look stupid is not a weakness to overcome. It's something precious to preserve. Evolution reached the jellyfish through 500 million years of trial and error. Your next good idea is probably sitting on the other side of a few bad ones you haven't been willing to say out loud yet.
The question isn't whether you have the talent, or the taste, or the intelligence. Those things matter less than you think. The only question that matters is whether you're willing to look stupid today.
Turns out “youthful” is more about courage than collagen + 3 steps to revive it.
Video Bite
Sol TV Creator Angelique MacArthur, shares strategies on how to treat setbacks as steps on your way to success.
Words of Wisdom
It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default.
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