Category: Reflections

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Failing well Reflections

Oh, but if you never try, you’ll never know

Cross over to the other side of fear. Do it afraid
Photo by Sammie Vasquez on Unsplash

I moved into my new house at the beginning of July, and I’m still settling in. It’s a new city, a beautiful space with new challenges that I didn’t think to expect. I had been planning this move since December 2019, but it had not been successful – what, with the enormous demands from property owners in Lagos who prefer to have an empty space over letting their property to a single career woman? But this is a story for another day.

I’m not sure what mental space I was in when I shared that tweet, but I could make guesses. The items on my todo list? – Projects that leave me sleepless on many occasions at night, or the thought of having to start writing all over again? I let these thoughts consume me, not because I felt I couldn’t take them on, but because sometimes, I felt the weight too big to manage. Where could I possibly start?

1. Don’t let your fear drive you to the point of exhaustion.

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt about fear, it is that fear should be the fuel that drives us to do the things that we’ve always wanted to do. I think it is okay to be afraid. Our dreams can get too big that they frighten us, and yes, they should scare us – They should scare us into doing. I remember Shalv’s words to me on one of those days when we’d talk about fears. He said, ‘be careful not to let your fear drive you to the point of exhaustion, babe.’

Sometimes, we get too afraid that we end up not doing anything. I know this because I’ve been there. Thanks, Youper!

Since fear is not something we can control, we can decide how we want to use our fears to define our next course of action.

2. Vision boards are really helpful!

When I have an idea, I get so excited about it that I start talking all about it at once to my friends, and then the thought of how to execute it finally dawns on me, and that’s when it becomes frightening. Will this end up like other half-woven ideas?

One of the perks of working with creatives is you get to explore different ways of putting together your scattered thoughts. I learnt about using vision boards from working with Jana and Sarah.

Vision boards help you put together your thoughts using pictures and words. They really do work! First, you think about what you want – Your goals about the project, and you put them down. However it is, just put them down. I can hear Jana’s voice in my head – ‘Nanya, you don’t have to make it pretty. It doesn’t have to make sense right now. We’ll just go ahead to put them all down.’ And yes we did.

Visualisation is essential, and it helps you reduce all the fears and anxiety you had built up while your thoughts were still forming. Once you can visualise it, you can bring your dream to life. In this regards, I use Miro for brainstorming. 

3. Check if it’s on the list ☑️

Jana, my colleague, said during our hangout one morning, ‘checklists save lives,’ and I couldn’t have said it better.

I started writing again. First, I registered a domain name, then I created an account on WordPress, and wrote everything I wanted to write about in a checklist. All of these didn’t happen in a day.

If your dream frightens you, put them in a checklist and try to focus so hard on working on one item that you eventually get to check it off your list.

4. Do it.

Yagazie Emezi said ’The only way you can do it on your own is to do it on your own.’ I will borrow from her words to say, the only way you can do it is to do it.

I know many dream weavers. One of them is Shalv, who is the most consistent person that I know. I’ll tell you one. This amazing person sent me songs of the day, every day, for ten straight months without flinching. Or maybe he did, but the songs didn’t ‘flinch.’ He’s also the person whom I share my many ideas with, and he’d ask if I’d noted them down. With many projects of his own, which he’s done a great deal of work on, I can’t say that I’m not inspired.

Another dream weaver that I know is my colleague, Biodun. He wanted a unique couch and a bed he saw on Pinterest. He would make a bed for himself and one for Alexa, his dog. And off he went to the market, scared of the uncertainty of how the finished work would be, but with heart thumping with excitement, he made a bed all by himself, for himself, and Alexa. I must admit that I’d doubted that it would come out okay, but the intensity with which he made these pieces of furniture inspired me. Alexa must have been proud when she saw her beautifully designed bed with bright led lights underneath and the inscribed letters of her name boldly written at the top of her bed.

To doing things afraid

Joyce Meyer said to do it afraid.

Fear! Has it ever been a problem for you, holding you back from moving into areas that could enrich your own life and the lives of others? 

Joyce Meyer, Do It Afraid.

Oh, but if you never try, you will never know. You will never know if you’ll do better as a writer if you never give writing a try. You will never know if you’ll make it to the interview stage if you do not submit your resume. If you don’t ask for that raise, how would you ever know that you won’t get it?

Because “everything we’ve always wanted is on the other side of fear”. We have to cross over, utilize it, channel it towards our passion, and then, we can have a great story to tell.

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Becoming Failing well Reflections Work

You don’t have to be perfect here

THE GOOD PLACE -- "Everything Is Fine" Episode 101-- Pictured: Kristen Bell as Eleanor -- (Photo by: Justin Lubin/NBC)

I recently came upon this quote by John Steinbeck, and it got me thinking about a lot of things.

‘And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.’

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

If I were to tell a younger me, or a newly hired junior colleague, one thing, it would be: ‘You don’t have to be perfect here. You just have to be. We want you to be.

And why not? The way I see it, we let perfect get in the way of being consistent, which is one thing I wish I knew before entering the working space. We fall into the trap of thinking that the way to do good work is by having to be perfect for the job. Sometimes, we feel we are not qualified for a job because we did not tick all the requirements. This can lead us to stall in sending out our resumes. But, are companies really after perfect people?

What does perfect mean?

At various points in my career, I have sat with HR to go over the qualities we want our next candidate to possess. I have gone through a good number of applicants feedback from our engineering team and I’ve done my fair share of performance appraisals, but not once was the criteria for success being perfect. 

For me, perfect is a myth and every time we use the word, what we mean is ‘good work.’ To be on the right track, we need to do well at what we are assigned to do. We can’t do good work without committing positive performance over and over again until it becomes a thing – until it becomes who we are. 

When we say that someone has the perfect experience on their resume, what we mean is that they tick yes to most, if not all, of the requirements listed on the job posting. They can be found wanting in some areas, but the key thing is how much of a learner they are and if they have shown exceptional promise in their field.

Who would you work with?

We want to work with someone consistent in doing the things they know how to do. We want someone open to learning and not afraid to communicate what they want. We want someone that people can vouch for, someone we trust to get the job done. Someone who has shown resilience and knowledge in how they handled their previous projects because consistency is what gets the job done. Consistency breeds progress; progress brings results and sets you up for success.

And what does positive performance mean? Showing up on time, being trustworthy and reliable, being a great team player, being consistent – This is what comes up in performance appraisals, not how perfect we were on the job.

Here’s a question – Have you ever delayed sending out a project you were working on because you felt it had to be good enough before turning it in? Did you ever get to turn it in?

Perfect does not come up in performance appraisals. 

In an article on Entrepreneur.com, Neil Patel wrote, ‘Trying to make something perfect can prevent us from making it just good.’ He further stated, ‘The perfect is the enemy of the good.’ 

Progress is what matters. Are you consistent in what you signed up willingly for? Why do we aim for perfection? Is good bad? Why can’t we aim for good work and take it from there?

Look at it this way – You finished watching a cooking show and you are fascinated by how Ronke of 9jaFoodie prepared her Afang soup, so you decide you are going to make yours exactly the way she described the steps in her video. It is going well, as you keep following the steps until you get to ‘Add a tbsp of oil which is equivalent to 15 ml,’ but you don’t have the measuring spoons. Yes, you have a regular spoon, but there is no way you can know for sure if what you have is equivalent to 15ml as described in the video. Does this spoil the chances of the food coming out good? You have two options – stop and throw the food out or continue with the process.

When we wait for perfection, it never comes. If you’d waited until you bought a measuring spoon, you might never have come around to cooking your Afang soup.

When we remove the need for perfection from the equation, what’s left? 

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”

Steve Jobs
Read: ‘A beautiful reminder about the power of showing up consistently…’

When we remove the need for perfection from the equation, all that’s left is good. Go on, be kind to yourself, and do good work. You are in the good place, and everything is fine.

Continue to be consistent and keep showing up. You don’t have to be perfect here. You just have to be.