Stepping into unknown is harder than stepping towards the failure

Today I’ve been considering whether I should kill this blog. Literally: save a few articles that attracted some traffic and shut down the server. I was surprised to see there were some visitors here.

When I clicked on the link and the site opened, I took a look at the date. The beginning of May. It’s been more than 2 months since the last article was published. And today... was a day when I realized the goal I’ve been putting effort into for the last half a year is not getting me where I want to be.

And I thought, ‘Giving up isn’t getting me anywhere at all.’ And that would be another failure. Well known, comfortable, relaxing. And... today isn’t the time.

Giving when full vs giving when empty

When I started this blog, I had no idea what I was doing. Later on, when I had lots of time, it became natural to sit in front of my iPad and focus on one topic that came to my mind. Now, when days are busy with a full-time job and the rest of the tasks, there is much less energy and time.

Lack of results leads to skipping the routine. It then easily slips out of the focus. I realized I had gone silent for 2 months. A similar thing happened to my YouTube channel. I made an attempt to reactivate it with simple daily content and failed a few days later.

It’s because my brain keeps telling me there’s no reason to do it.

The unknown challenge

It was today when my brain rewired and revealed a simple yet powerful truth: I subconsciously pick failure as a well-known result. And it hit me today: it’s more comfortable to fail than to keep acting through the unknown.

Last year, I was challenging myself by closing my eyes while walking. Obviously, I wasn’t doing that on busy street, and I’m not suggesting doing so. However, I thought that was quite similar to what I was doing. My best results were 23 steps until I started panicking and opened my eyes.

Sometimes I was a bit to the right or left from the initial trajectory. But I still hadn’t hit any tree, fallen, or otherwise harmed myself.

I was investigating how a lack of clarity (vision in this case) affects me and how long I can handle it. After around 15 steps each subsequent step feels incredibly hard and scary! It feels like I’m lost. No control and understanding, and imagining I’m going to fall down into a ditch in the very next second.

It’s not enough to learn how to walk

The experiment I described above taught me how important it is to see at least one step ahead. It is not so comfortable, but still doable, to walk at night with very limited sight versus no visibility at all.

Being able to take a step is just half of success. Knowing where to step is the other half. By repeating the steps, we eventually get somewhere. Sometimes it’s the same place we started from.

At least we’ve been for a walk.