Getting Better at Failing

I seem to fail a lot. Often enough that I wonder if I'm just born to lose. I always tell myself, "this time will be different, this time I simply won't fail," and I always end up back in the same place.

The other day, I had a thought. I've always tried to combat the idea that I'm destined to fail. But what if I *am* destined to fail? What if "just try not to fail" will never work? What if failure *really is* an inevitability? In that case, my only real option would be to get better at failing.

I have a few ideas about what "getting better at failing" means. I tend to do a lot better when I'm waking up early, rather than sleeping in. This clashes with one of my hobbies, stargazing, but I don't really go out every night these days, so I think I can get away with staying up late only sometimes. However, I have absolutely noticed my sleep-wake times coinciding with the cycles of my life: I stay up late and sleep in every day when I'm doing badly, and I go to sleep early and wake up early when I'm doing well.

My bullet journal helps to keep me aware of what's going on in my life and what I need to be thinking about. If I'm going to get nothing done, then "failing better" means that I should at least know exactly what things I'm not getting done.

One of my worst habits is doomscrolling social media for hours. I don't mind spending a lot of time online, I just want to feel like I'm benefitting from it in some way, and spending hours scrolling places like reddit is very strongly associated with missing deadlines and disengaging with my own life. I think it just reinforces all my negative thought patterns - something that definitely doesn't happen when I'm exploring personal websites or reading posts on BBSes.

With these things in mind,  I've developed some "fail rules" (in no particular order):
* Wake up early, even if I plan on disengaging with everything/just playing video games all day (the only exception is for stargazing)
* Review the bullet journal daily, even if you don't do anything in it
* Similarly, write today's date in the daily log, even if you don't write anything else
* If I doomscroll social media, I must make a mark on the "doomscroll card," a 4x6 inch index card that contains an x for every instance of doomscrolling

I'll try to implement these rules throughout the rest of the year, and hopefully, report back on whether or not it works.

The one final important detail is that, with changes like these, my worst habit by far is telling myself, "and it applies starting tomorrow!" Because tomorrow's me is going to say the same fucking thing, and the me after that will say it, and the me after that, and the me after that, and the me after that...

The rules apply starting *now*. By the time this post is published, I'll already be doing them. I know I'm going to open reddit as soon as I'm done writing this, so once I close the editor, I am going to get an index card, write "doomscroll card" on it, and make a mark. I'm gonna try to review my journal after that.

I would also like to note that I don't think these rules would work for someone else by default, since this is a response to a very specific, recurring problem I have where I just kinda give up. I use waking up late as an excuse not to do anything, but I don't have trouble waking up early, so if I'm going to do nothing, I might as well wake up early to get a headstart on doing nothing. It takes like, 5 minutes to review the bullet journal and write the date, but I avoid doing it so that I don't have to think about the things I'm not doing, but I can always just go right back to not thinking about it once I'm done. I have tried, many times, to stop doomscrolling, and "just try to stop 4head" isn't working, so unlike journaling and waking up early, it needs a different approach. Other people have different strengths and weaknesses and so this isn't likely to be effective. However, I'm thinking that the general idea of "if you keep failing this thing, try to get better at failing it" might be worth talking abou
t more in the future.

tags: failure, getting-things-done