These two things are topics I came back to again and again in the course of my posts.
Which is worse? Is the fear that prevents you from trying something worse than actually failing at it? Is failing at something you've been practicing for a while worse than messing up because you're so worried about it?
To me, fear is far more crippling than failure is. You can and will fail as you progress, screw up on the road to getting better. But you can learn from failure! It might very well suck at the time, but a year later the sting is gone and you've probably taken steps to make sure that failure never happens again. But fear?
Fear will keep you from trying. And not trying means not doing, which means you can't get better at something. Fear will spiral around in your head and wind up convincing you that something with a small risk could end up with the worst humiliation ever. Fear can actually affect your technique and make you more likely to fail!
You might make a failure a bigger deal than it is, but ultimately it's something that actually happened. Fear is a product of the mind that can be expanded to ridiculous levels with no basis in reality. You know why kids learn so quickly? One reason is that they have no fear, no baggage about "what if..." and "but I might..." They just do. And if they mess up, they mess up. It doesn't have the impact we as adults give it. We can learn from that.
Would you rather be someone who only plays a limited amount of things because they're worried about looking like a failure in front of others? Or someone who's open to trying new things, often messing up, but getting better with every attempt? Which of the two types is going to wind up better off in the long run, with more experience to draw from, more practiced skills?
That's not to say that failure is minor. While I recommend brushing off mistakes and errors during the performance, I strongly recommend taking them seriously after the show. If you don't address the things that went wrong that were within your control, you're not going to get better and you're limiting the potential of the ensemble. But failure is rarely literally failure in these situations. Your bachi aren't going to explode into 50 pieces and blind someone. You're not going to hit the drum so hard that it rolls into the audience and crushes someone. You can't screw up a song so badly that the composer catches on fire! Mostly likely, you get off tempo or play the wrong section. That sucks, but is it really "failure"?
Failure can and will happen, but once it does, the song continues. You move on. Fear can and may happen, but it won't go away until you make it go away - either by forcing it out or doing the thing you were so worried about. I would rather fail almost any day rather than fear the failing.
So what about you? What do you fear in your art and how can you overcome it? Where did you fail and how did you learn from it? And has fear of something caused you to fail?
I'll end this post with a quote attributed to Bruce Lee. "Don't fear failure. — Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.”
image credit: https://holykaw.alltop.com
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