(I wrote this for an article in automata magazine and figured I would share it here too since it has so much to do with my current struggles.)

Have you ever wanted something so badly that you were willing to face your fears in order to obtain it?

A little background

I’ve always been fascinated by mechanical devices. As a kid, I used to take apart things to see how they worked (much to my parents dismay). In the early days, I would take things apart to examine the insides, but not be able to get them back together again. As I got older I found out about resale shops (and their seemingly endless supply of cheap gadgets).  I got really good at tinkering and actually started modifying and repairing things.

I got married and we had a family. I got into haunted houses after the kids were old enough to have fun in them.  I volunteered to automate things with air actuated props, flying ghosts and other effects (kind of life sized automata curiously enough). Eventually I started to get paid for my props & design work, but I never felt that it was sustainable enough to make an actual living, so it remained a seasonal and occasional thing. I ended up relying on my work in IT (health information technology) to pay the bills. Over the years, my titles changed and pay went up (as well as the responsibility) and my time and energy for tinkering basically dwindled down to only the necessities of repair or maintenance of home appliances and gadgets. My love for tinkering slowly became a chore and I lost the desire to invent or create.

Fast forward to a few months ago (OK, maybe a year or more…). I came across a YouTube video from Cabaret Mechanical Theatre showing all of these little moving sculptures called automata. Miniature versions of the kinds of things I had built in my haunted houses – but even better, more wondrous and not limited to only scary or gory things. I thought I had finally “found my purpose”. I really wanted to dive right in and create. Unfortunately, there was a problem.

The Problem

Up until recently I didn’t understand why I had seemingly lost my ability to be creative. I used to have so much energy and drive and I would routinely take on way too many interests at the same time. Somehow over time I became unmotivated and no amount of effort or willpower seemed to make a difference. I figured I was just depressed or kind of dispassionate in general. I thought that was my main problem. I searched for years to try to fix my lack of drive and procrastination. I tried deadlines, micro-tasks, positive thinking, planners, calendars and reward systems. Every single piece of advice or strategy I found that seemed promising would end up with the same result. I’d try putting it into practice, I’d dive in with a lot of initial hope and enthusiasm, but as soon as there was a fairly minor setback the willpower would fade and I would begin to give up hope again.

So there I was, wanting to try making my own automata but something in the back of my mind was telling me that I don’t know enough about it and don’t have any of the tools or the space to get started. So I binge watch everything I could possibly find on the subject. What tools do you need? What materials do you make them out of? What kind of skills and knowledge do you need? Hours and hours of watching magnificent creations, tutorials & guides. Days of “researching” turned into weeks and then months…

They say that the first step in solving a problem is to recognize that you have one.

Fear of Failure

Yup.

Over the last several years I have been working on myself. Trying to overcome depression and feelings of meaninglessness. That journey led me to work on listening to my inner thoughts without assigning any right or wrong to them.  …and during one of those moments of calm listening I came across a thought with a lot of emotion attached to it. “You don’t know what you are doing. You will fail.”

I have learned that most healthy adults recognize that failure is a necessary part of the learning process, but up until recently I didn’t have a clue. It was drilled into my head that failure is a HUGE deal. Everything in my life up to this point seemed to have a cost, judgment, grade, score, outcome or consequence attached to my performance. Reinforced by family expectations, school grades, work performance evaluations and raises, and even society in general (especially through the media). The message to me was you’re either a high performer that doesn’t make mistakes or a poor performing nobody. The hidden effect of social media makes it much worse, and it’s the very thing I use to learn more about every subject these days.

Turns out that I never quite put together that what I see on social media is very skewed toward the top. Through the algorithms and voting systems only the most popular content gets returned by a search or fed into your watch/stream/reading list. By binge watching videos and “researching” everything there is to know about a subject, I am unintentionally building a really skewed idea of what is “normal”.  I use what I am learning to judge how much I should be able to accomplish. In addition, only the best successes and most catastrophic failures make the lists, so I start to build an inaccurate picture of reality. One where I am either hugely successful or an equally huge failure (sadly both in front of everyone as a form of entertainment now).

The Solution(s)

OK, don’t judge me here…  I did more binge “research” on the fear of failure, and surprisingly I came across a lot of really helpful advice. I’m not going to go into the details of all that I have learned about the subject here, because I want to get to the best part of my journey. If you have a similar problem with fear of failure and are curious about what I found, here’s a quick bullet list of things I have found to be helpful and true for me.

When you are afraid of failure:

• Do it anyway (you can be really, really afraid and still do a thing.  …this is so critical!)
• Become more fearful of not taking action (people near the end of their lives say the same thing “you will regret the things you didn’t do in your life”)
• Failure = Life lessons (and nothing more. Really.)
• Failure is the fastest pathway to growth (you learn and retain more knowledge from failure than success, so do a lot and fail often and fast)
• Be OK with looking foolish (only people that are afraid of failure themselves will make fun of you for failing)
• Risk = Bravery
• Nobody likes a story of perfection without struggle (the best stories are those of overcoming massive struggle and potential failure)

The Challenge

During my research on overcoming a fear of failure I came across an artist challenge. The challenge is called the “Alphabet Superset”.  I’m not going to go into all of the fine details of the Alphabet Superset here, you can learn all about it by watching the introductory video by @struthless on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tTOQT4HhXI) or read about it at http://alphabetsuperset.com.

Here’s the basic idea: You have to create an art piece every week for roughly 6 months (26 pieces in total). Each new art piece starts with the next letter in the alphabet starting with “A” (26 letters, 26 art pieces). You have to choose some constraints (medium, style, output and a theme) so you don’t have too many options to choose from and to help make sure that the entire body of work is cohesive at the end. Most important – is that you have to post every art piece online for the world to see.

I chose to make an automata every week. My constraints are as follows: 1) It has to be out of mostly wood & fit on a 3x5x1.5 inch base, 2) It has to be a simple, where the entire movement mechanism fits in a 2.5” diameter hole in the wood and is turned by a hand crank, 3) my theme is a robot trying to find enlightenment (or happiness) and finally 4) I decided that each design (good or bad) has to be posted on YouTube on or before Saturday evening every week of the challenge.

Part of the challenge (before the start date) was to write a letter to my future self and schedule it to be delivered to me on the last day of the challenge. I thought at first that this was an unnecessary step, but over the course of the last few months there have been some rough times where I have felt like quitting. That letter to myself that is sitting in my “scheduled” items in my email has been a savior and reminder to me of why I started this challenge in the first place. I set a goal to be able to read it at the end having successfully finished the challenge. I can’t let myself down – and I know how much love, admiration and encouragement for my future self I included in that letter, so as weird as it sounds, I want to make my past self super proud of me.

I do regret my choice of the theme of robot enlightenment at times… OK a lot of the time. In perfect hindsight (which is my personal superpower by the way) I should have picked a theme that wasn’t very hard to find words/concepts for (and also wasn’t a topic mostly internal to one’s own head). On that note; If someone could tell me how to animate a little robot doing “meditation” that would be really helpful right now since I am on “L” in the alphabet as I am writing this and have no idea what to do for either “L” or “M” that has to do with enlightenment other than “meditation” at the moment.

This challenge directly confronts my fear of failure and forces me to do so on a regular basis for a fairly long period of time. I can’t emphasize enough how much growth I have felt in just the last few months. I was literally shaking with fear when I hit “post” on my first video “Acceptance”. Now I have more than a dozen videos, hundreds of subscribers and over a hundred thousand views. I have met and befriended so many wonderful people through this challenge and I have started a new business selling my designs at both markets and on Etsy.  I’ve built a website and expanded my on-line presence to Instagram & Facebook. …and as of right now, I am overcoming my fear of failure yet again by writing to a group of people that I admire and respect (so I worry if this is too off topic).

What’s next?

I don’t know. One of the most wonderful things about this journey to overcome my fears is that I find myself not worrying as much about what’s going to happen after the Alphabet Superset is over. Everything seems to be turning out better and better for me every day. Even on the “bad” days I learn something new about myself and grow as a person. I find myself being grateful for the simple things, and by sharing all of this journey with the world, I find that there are so many wonderful people out there that I never imagined would become part of my life. That all has given me more confidence to just go with the flow and see where this all leads.

I am planning to finish the Alphabet Superset. I have not been able to keep up with the weekly schedule lately because of Holiday Market, Etsy sales and gifts for Christmas, but that is also part of what I have learned from all of this… Having a deadline and structure is very important, but being too unnecessarily rigid or rushing through the process is not healthy in the long run either. I’ll likely catch back up to the right letter of the alphabet over the next month or two, but if I have to move the end of the challenge out a bit, that’s OK too.  I know that I will still be very proud of myself when I finish.

If you resonate with anything I have written and you have a desire to build automata, I strongly encourage you to just start creating (and share it with all of us). The world needs more creative people, and if you have the desire, please don’t miss the opportunity to live your best life. There’s no reason to be fearful of potential failures.