There comes a moment in time when you realise the thing you’ve been running from has been chasing you in circles. Fear doesn’t hunt you down—it waits for you to tire out, watching you circle the same ground until your legs give out from the exhaustion of your beliefs.
When I was younger, I’d work hard to rehearse some conversations in my head before speaking up at someone or in a room. Every word weighed and measured, every possible stumble anticipated and avoided. Then the day would come, I’d walk into the room sharing respect for the people in it, and completely butcher what I was going to say. I’d forget my main points, waffle around the same idea for too long, and end up in verbal rubble. Where the silence that follows feels like drowning.
I repeat this problem for a while. But in time, I started realising the most important part of that silence: nobody dies. The world kept spinning. And buried in that wreckage of points I tried to make was something I couldn’t have found in all my preparation—a raw, honest conversation about what I was trying to solve and get to. This mess is the message.
Our brains are wired for a world that no longer exists. Fear served us well when getting things wrong meant becoming something else’s dinner. But where is this possible in a board room, classroom or quiet moment of creating? The same alarm system fires at ghosts as we treat intellectual stumbles like physical danger, flooded bodies with the same chemicals those before us used to outrun predators.
What I’m trying to say is simple: we learn through error correction. A child learning to walk succeeds by falling, not avoiding it. Each drop teaches their muscles something new about balance. But somewhere along the way for many people, they grow up believing that “smart people, cool people, don’t fall”. We start confuse perfection or stillness with competence.
Treat it like this: the distance between where you are and where you want to be is measured in the mistakes you’re willing to make to move forward. Expertise is built with what you get wrong first. Because every master was once a beginner who refused to stay one. The violin virtuoso hit more wrong notes in practice than most people hit right ones in performance. The chess grandmaster lost more games learning than most players ever finish. And the top surgeon has made more cuts on cadavers than they’ll ever make on living patients
Every error is data your brain couldn’t get any other way. You wouldn't expect a sculptor to reveal a masterpiece without first chipping away excess stone. Your intellect works the same way. Each wrong turn reveals what doesn't belong, each misstep teaches your mind something it couldn't learn from books. Things can look bad until they look like magic. And it’s okay for them to.
In philosophy, it’s saying that courage is intimacy with discomfort. When you make peace with looking foolish, you unlock something most people never touch. You become someone who learns faster than they worry, who grows quicker than they judge themselves.
Brilliance often wears the costume of clumsiness first. The ideas that matter most are usually the ones that make us trip over before we fly. So stumble. Fall forward. Let yourself be beautifully, completely wrong on your way to being right.
The scariest thing isn't making mistakes. It's reaching the end of your life and realising you never let yourself begin.