The story of Fofa and the importance of failure
Hello once again, dear Humanity
It’s been a long time since we had our last exchange here. Exactly one year and two days ago, I wrote my first words to you, with the hope that they won’t be the last. It turned out that they weren’t. However, in the last few months, we have not been on speaking (or writing) terms. I have not forgotten about you, neither have you forgotten to give me more than enough food for thought. The thing is that an unwelcome guest crawled their way back to my mind, let themselves in, and made themselves comfortable. The guest is called Fear of Failure, or as I call it Fofa. I dislike Fofa very much, as it is stopping me from engaging you the way I want, my dear Humanity. It is making me doubt myself and my dreams, and it almost feels like it is addicted to making me miserable.
What is Fofa?
Fofa is a creature that, if allowed, will prey upon your dreams, eat them up and leave you lingering and suffering. It can grow in any human’s mind and often leads to depressions, regrets, missed opportunities. Fofa wants you to be mediocre, it drains your courage and replaces it with fear. Its major battle cry is “security”. It whispers in your ear all the hurdles in front of you, draws pictures of horrible mishaps, enlarges all the challenges and shrinks the possibility of success. It tells you to never leave your comfort zone because you might get hurt if you do. Fofa always makes you feel like its intentions are good. It reassures you it wants to protect you, to shield you from pain. And while doing so, behind your own back, it kills your creativity and vigour with a thousand paper cuts. If Fofa manages to come out victorious from a battle with the human’s mind, it leaves behind a grey, stale, monotonous, dumb sadness, silence and dread. It loves cynicism and hates hope, so a human beaten by Fofa is extremely cynical and hopeless.
Fofa’s strategy
Fofa is a very clingy being. It creeps around like a stalker, absolutely hates it when it goes unnoticed. It desires attention to survive. If you disregard your Fofa, it starts roaring its ugly head and pushing its way back to you. It is exceedingly difficult to resist its power, because it has many ways of overwhelming you. It can strike you with one strong, swift bow and overpower you for minutes. If you are able to withstand its initial strike, it adapts very well. It manoeuvres its way through various dark alleys, hides in the shadows, or sometimes even in plain sight, looks for any backdoors, cheats its way back to your mind. And if you somehow manage to outsmart it, to outpace it, to lock every door and to secure every loophole, Fofa becomes patient. It creeps its way to a far, small corner, begins to plot its new strategy and waits. It waits for the right moment, when you are tired, when your guard is down, when you are at your most vulnerable, and then it presents itself to you as a dear old friend. It promises you security and safety. It dresses itself in its best clothes and deceives you into thinking that it is not necessary to guard yourself against it. Ultimately, it always finds a way and opens the door.
Dealing with Fofa
And then comes the most challenging part — you have to deal with it, as Fofa is absolutely relentless and does never let up. You are presented with a choice. The first option is to try to fight it, kick it out of your head, but it is a mighty struggle to accomplish that. And even if you do, you are back at square one, as Fofa will start employing all its devious plots to come back in, and eventually it will. That’s a vicious cycle that cannot be broken and once you are in it, Fofa is grinning happily, as it knows it has achieved its victory.
The second option is to try to ignore it and accept its presence, get used to Fofa sapping on your creativity and dreams, until you are again mad at it and go back to option one. However, there is a third option, the one that will give you a chance for a victory down the road.
The third option is to acknowledge Fofa’s existence and perseverance and then to politely inform it that you will not pay it the attention it requires, instead putting your efforts in other endeavours, such as acting upon your dreams. Fofa is very frightened of this third option and will give its best shot in the attempt to convince you that working for your dreams is too risky, too tiresome and too big of a challenge for you. You can then thank it for its feedback and let it know that it is neither warranted, nor wanted. Fofa will be absolutely devastated at this point and you will see it fading away like ice melting in the scorching sun. It will evaporate and leave in its place but a mark of its sorry existence.
To gather the strength to exercise the third option, a human needs a lot of tools, a lot of patience and a leap of faith. The support and love of our friends and family is probably the best tool there is, and I have found out that sharing your experience of this fight with your loved ones goes a long way in helping to defeat this great enemy. Getting professional psychological advice is also something to recommend in such situations. Finding out that you are not alone and Fofa is actually a being that every human has to fight with gives you the necessary courage to face it. And being forgiving to yourself is key — if you are patient with yourself and your errors, Fofa will bow down to your will sooner rather than later. At the end, of course, you need to jump into the deep waters, as they say, and this is actually the moment you are free and Fofa’s influence on you has disappeared.
Owning failure
Another vital component in the struggle against Fofa is knowledge about failure. To fail is to be human, to fail is to learn. Failure is a natural and actually very useful part of life. Unfortunately, I feel that you, dear Humanity, have been taught that failure is something to be avoided at all costs and that is how you have created Fofa. The culture that success is the most important thing in the world and you cannot fail, you must only succeed, is leading to a giant, powerful, indestructible Fofa, which starts to eat up not only every single human being, but the whole of you, dear Humanity. You start to doubt yourself, to lose faith in yourself and ultimately, to settle for mediocrity. But if you look at your most successful people, they have always embraced failure. Michael Jordan, one of the most successful sportsmen of all time, made basketball look easy and won pretty much everything there is to win in this sport. That’s what he said of failure: “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and I’ve missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
I have found these words to be extremely profound and true, also in my life. I have also failed many times and learning from this failure has always brought me success and also joy. Allowing myself the room to fail has never, ever let me down. But not allowing myself the room to fail has always, every time put me in a hole and made me miserable. And since Fofa is always there, waiting to pounce on every mistake, the more you try to follow your dreams and wishes, the more mistakes you make, the more you learn from them, forcing Fofa to become smaller and smaller until it’s gone for good.
So, dear Humanity, since the popular saying goes that to change to world you need to change yourself first, I am vowing to not let Fofa defeat me anymore. In doing that I am hoping that you, my dearest, will also start to change and will start to accept and embrace your fears and flaws and learn from them, so that we can walk forward with a brave smile on our faces, looking ahead of us, without any Fofas in sight, with a spring in our step and hope in our heart.
Love you forever,
Petko
