Find Your Point of Failure and Push Through

Peel the union until there is nothing left by you and your dreams

Throw caution to the wind and just climb your own goddamn mountain. Photo: Diego Gennaro, Unsplash.

Life is an experiment, a marvelous learning journey, a wonderful exploration of life, and a daring pursuit of happiness – if we are not afraid of physical, mental, and spiritual failures, fractures, and a few broken bones.

Hunter S. Thompson, the father of gonzo journalism, lifelong heckler of Nixon, and one of my literary heroes, took life by the horn from an early age, lived like the wind, and wrote the tales until his self-chosen end and got shot into space by Johnny Depp.

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!”

If you treat life like a China vase, fragile and tender, you’ll never find out who you really are and what you could become. Being careful is probably the worst advice I ever got; trapping the mind, body, and spirit in the dangerous twins of fear and caution.

Physical, emotional, and spiritual scars tell an interesting story about daring to walk the fine line between failure and success. I wouldn’t have learned to surf if I hadn’t cracked a few ribs, got dragged over a reef, and got stung by a sting ray. No Siree!

It’s through failures – Edison’s famous one thousand tries to create the lightbulb for example – that we make the real discoveries. The scientific method is designed around the idea of constant failures until we’re are all out of options but raging success.

Just like the ethos behind fewer better things, that we only keep what we really need and let go of externally fabricated wants. That we focus on what matters to us in the journey throughout life, however rare or obscure that passion or interest might be.

Clarity can only emerge when we have shaved off all the excess, when we have gotten rid of all the dead weight, when we have made the choice to choose less but better – not only for ourselves but also for our fellow human beings and the planet.