Don't Be Afraid to Fail

“Don’t be afraid to fail. Be afraid not to try.” -Anonymous

Last week I made the decision to put a built-in bench in the kitchen/dining area of a home I’m remodeling. To do that, though, I had to block off one of the hall entrances in order to have a wall to install the bench on. In my head it looked great, and the built-in was going to solve the issue of traffic from the living room to the kitchen. The problem is, by the time it all went up, that extra wall had suddenly blocked all light flow to the hallway and immediately made the space feel smaller.

So I decided to try an alternate solution: keep the bench, but open the wall halfway so that light could stream through and the “window” could provide another point of interest in the home. I knocked a preliminary hole out, and immediately the space felt better.

The bottom line is that I had to try, even if I failed the first time, because without trying, I would never have found the perfect set up that I did, and I’d instead be left with endless “what if” questions in my mind. So whenever you’re faced with an idea that could end in failure, don’t be afraid of that failure; it just might lead you to the best outcome (even when you least expect it).