Celebrating Failure

An activity I've recently picked up is playing Escape Room games.  You and a team are placed inside a room with a locked door, and you have to go through a series of puzzles, hidden doors, riddles and so forth in order to escape the room within 60 minutes.  No matter how close you might be to winning, if you don't make it out in time you've failed, so it's a very binary feeling of accomplishment or disappointment at the end.

It took a couple of attempts in different rooms before I started getting the hang of it.  Without any prior experience, it took some time for my friend and I to get into the right mindset for how to go about solving the room, and it required a lot of trial and error.  But after each failure I felt I'd gained some valuable insight to keep in mind for the next attempt, and I also felt a renewed sense of determination that I was definitely going to succeed the next time.

I'm generally a little bit a perfectionist, and it can actually be a deterrent  against trying new things if I don't believe I can do them to my own satisfaction.  Failure is a difficult thing or me to accept, and I end up dwelling on it for a long time afterwards trying to figure out it could've been avoided.  Some of my experiences in this class have forced me to accept the potential of failure a little more, and try to not feel too much disappointment if I'm not able to do something perfectly right away.