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Self-improvement Through Innovation
In the current era, we regularly hear about the concept of “innovation.” The main idea behind innovation is to continually apply new approaches or methods on a small scale and then observe what type of impacts those changes have. It is likely that some of these small-scale experiments will fail but inevitably there will be some of them that will prove beneficial, and those are the ideas you keep. You just discard the ideas that do not work out.
Failure is nothing more than another interesting data point and is definitely not something to be taken personally.
This approach to innovation can also be applied to the domain of self-improvement. You can treat yourself as an innovation. The secret to having success with this approach is to avoid personalizing any failure. It is guaranteed that you will fail at various times, for that is the very nature of innovation. The key is that you cannot think of yourself as the failure, reminding yourself that it was merely the idea that did not work at the current time and in your present circumstances. It is solely another data point that can be used to help inform how you should — or should not — move forward towards whatever goal it is that you are trying to accomplish.
Embracing the mindset that failure is more than okay — it is expected and welcomed — is the hardest thing for us to do.