How Risking Failure Can Make You Happier

from john place online . com

Have you ever thought about taking a chance? Risking failure?

Maybe right now you’re thinking about starting a business, running a marathon, learning a new skill, or going back to school. Maybe you’re thinking about doing something simple, like asking your boss for a raise, or something complex, like trying to convince your board of directors to pursue a multi-million dollar business venture. Maybe you’re thinking about asking someone new out on a date, investing in a promising new stock, or changing careers.

With all these opportunities at your fingertips, what’s keeping you from taking a chance?

If your answer to that question involves fear of failure, listen up. The field of positive psychology suggests that you’re much more likely to regret “failing to act” than “acting and failing.”

If you’re looking for a little incentive to take a big chance, consider these words from Harvard Psychologist Daniel Gilbert:

In the long run, people of every age and in every walk of life seem to regret not having done things much more than they regret things they did, which is why the most popular regrets include not going to college, not grasping profitable business opportunities, and not spending enough time with family and friends.

We’ve got a lot of ideas about what decisions we’ll live to regret, and many of these ideas are just plain wrong.

Case in point: Let’s say that you own Stock in ACME Corporation. Last year, you thought about switching to stock in Big-Profit corporation, but decided against it, and now you’ve learned that you would have made an extra $1,000 dollars if you’d made the switch. Conversely, let’s say that during the same time you bought shares in RipOff Industries and ended up losing $1,000. Which of these two scenarios do you think you would regret the most? The foolish action? Or the foolish inaction?

According to Gilbert:

Studies show that 9 out of 10 people expect to feel more regret when they foolishly switch stocks than when they foolishly fail to switch stocks, because most people think they will regret foolish actions more than foolish inactions. But studies also show that 9 out of 10 people are wrong.

So why do foolish actions tend to make us happier than foolish inactions? The answer is simple: we learn from our failures.

Although it is possible to learn lessons by watching the failures of others and by reminiscing about all our lost opportunities, those lessons are not as immediate or tactile as those learned through hands-on trial and error. Put more simply, when you try hard to achieve something and fail despite your best effort, you are often able to justify your hard work with stories of valuable lessons learned and the quality of the experience itself.

But if you passively watch your opportunities evaporate, you’ll have no such justification.

Of course, this doesn’t mean we should jump at every high-risk opportunity, nor does it make the analysis of those opportunities easier.

But it does suggest that if you’ve been considering a big life-change for a while now, have weighed the pros and cons, and are sure you want to do it — and the only thing holding you back is fear of failure — your best play might be to go for it.