“Success is not about believing in yourself.  It’s a comfort with embarrassing yourself,”  In the vein of permission and a slightly different take on success, let’s talk about putting ourselves out there.  There are so many things to learn out there we can’t possibly know them all—and we can’t learn them until we get our hands in there and experience it.  If we want to go for something and we’ve made the decision to do it (see yesterday’s piece about permission) then we need to allow ourselves the experience of learning.  Expecting perfection on the first time out is unrealistic and mistakes don’t mean that we need to give up.  We need to incorporate the lesson and try again.  And fail.  And learn.  And stumble.  And fall.  And pick ourselves up.  And keep going. 

I personally feel like success is measured by an extreme belief in oneself, more specifically a belief that we can figure anything out even if we don’t know all the answer snow and we can’t see all the potential issue of what is to come.  But I thought the quote was still an interesting take on what it means to be successful.  We don’t start out successful, we start out with an idea.  That idea doesn’t even have to be really well founded—it just needs to be tested.  We have to be willing to go through that experimentation to learn how to make it better.  So moving into success isn’t paramount on that initial belief.  We can foster belief as we go no matter how silly we look.  At the end of the day it doesn’t matter how we look on the journey—it’s developing comfort in discovering where we are going and how we feel when we get there.