The voice in your head has one answer.

An outcome of catastrophic failure, leading to absolute ruin, destitution, and maybe even death… perhaps simply of shame.

The thought alone is so viscerally terrifying, you don’t dare to even look at it in its entirety, let alone follow through with whatever it was that begged the question in the first place.

But the voice in your head has a flaw in its plan to keep you rooted to inaction by fear.

It’s overreached.

When written down or said aloud, the outcome it proposes begins to feel ridiculous in its hyperbole.

Almost laughable.

And so it’s worth asking the question again, with a twist, “What’s the worst that is likely to happen?”

Thought through with cool rationality, the worst likely outcome is usually something you could live with.

It may not be comfortable, it may not be easy, it may take a while to come back from.

But it’s clear that it’s something you could come back from.

What’s more, the stakes are no longer so high that you can afford to ignore the other side of the question out of hand.

What’s the best that could happen?

All work worth doing exists in the tension between these two possibilities.

No worthwhile project or creation is free from the possibility of failure.

The freedom of failure may be possible for a factory, mass-manufacturing widgets, but not for a creator, artist, or entrepreneur.

Each of these titles carries the implication of doing something new, of creating out of whole cloth, of bringing something to the world that has never existed before.

Every successful creator learns to dance with the possibility of failure.

Flirting with it, tempting fate, falling prey to its seductions many a time.

Then returning to the floor to pick up the beat and resume.

Don’t let the voice in your head keep you from taking the floor in the first place.

It’s just a dance after all.

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