I think I am going to plan on writing daily here. I do not know exactly what I will talk about each day, but I think I’m gonna plan on writing about what I am working on and what I have learned.

As the title suggests the most important thing in life for me is Failure. I have recently gotten back into 3d printing and this is the most recent print that I attempted:

If it isn’t completely obvious this print completely failed and ended up being dragged around the extruder creating that gum like monument in the center. Somehow, the filament line also got disconnected which if it didn’t the gum would be a lot bigger. Basically long story short, everything that could go wrong with the print did.

The print turning into gum was due to the print bed being too close to the extruder. Which was something that I just intentionally did as I leveled the print bed, but I leveled it to only a thin sheet of paper in distance. It turned out that was too close and aiming for that perfect small gap in between the two caused the entire print to fail wasting 30 minutes of printing time and a small amount of plastic filament. I releveled the printing bed to a more comfortable two pieces of paper, and its is printing perfectly as the mechanical whirling of the arms of the printing moving fills my house.

As someone who has been a perfectionist all my life and will stay on small mistakes I make no matter how easily fixable or how easy the mistake is, I will stay on it for hours and think about how I am terrible at whatever the mistake was related to. As egotistical as it may sound, I do not fail often and when I do it isn’t a spectacular failure that affects me greatly. When I was in university, I was the type of student who no matter how little studying I did, or how much I pushed assignments to the last minute, I was never punished. I never truly failed in a majority of my classes. There was one political science class I was in where the professor swore that if you procrastinate and do your assignments in one night, you will not get a good grade. Out of pure spite and ego, I decided to write a short five page paper the night before. It took me 6 hours to finish. I did not cut any corners to meet that time. I still got an A on that paper.

Every time I had a “you can’t do this in one night” assignment, I secretly hoped that it would be true.

I felt that no matter how lazy I was, no matter how much I procrastinated it did not matter. I would still pass. Which all of that was great when it comes to university or even earlier schooling, but now I am realizing how much that harmed me.

I never truly failed. I never truly had to accept and embrace failure, I always had a way out of the problem instead of facing what I failed and improving on it. The one failure I had in my education was attempting to take Calculus 3 entirely online during COVID and getting a D in it. Even then I did not have to face that failure, I just switched my major from mechanical engineering to psychology, which was something I was planning for most of the semester as I found it a great deal annoying that I had so much busy work of assignments I already knew how to do.

Failure has been something I religiously avoided and had plans to avoid. Even in high school I avoided playing on the varsity teams that I could easily make in favor of playing on the easier JV teams. I said I did that to “avoid politics” as my position was taken by the son of the coach, but I think I was just lazy. If there was something I did fail at, I would have thousands of excuses and other work around ready to diminish it both to others as well as to myself. Every time I would set up something I want to incorporate into my daily life and I don’t successfully do it, I don’t fail I just decided I had better things to do.

For me I never reached an objective failure of something I did. I don’t dare to let myself wander into areas where I might fail.

But now, I am ready to fail. I will most likely fail at writing everyday. I will most likely fail at writing a novel. I will most likely fail in thousands of ways that I do not even know how.

But no matter what I will pick up where I failed at and start again, learning more every time.