You have permission to fail.

You have permission to be bad at what you do.

It's fine to fail. For most of us, it's an inevitability.

For art, failure is part of the process. We do ourselves a disservice by rendering failure as something bad, something to be avoided.

Failure—good failure—often comes with pain. Yes, pain. Pain is not a bad thing either—neither should all pain be avoided. Some pain in failure makes it valuable, memorable. If you fail at something with a little bit of pain, you'll remember that failure—and at best, at your most anti-fragile self, you'll go beyond and improve from that failure.

Key to improving from failure, from that permission to be bad, is to reduce the length of the feedback loop. "Fail fast and early" is a common mantra from the startup ecosystem. Fail early, learn quickly, and leap from failure to the next with no loss of enthusiasm.

It's trite, I know. You've probably heard this before. Sometimes, though, there's a reason why these common, canonical lessons reverberate with slight variations throughout different authors' works. Accepting failure, embracing it, that lesson to learn from failure itself—it's trite because it's part of a larger canon of wisdom. Those who have lived through enough life know that failure is unavoidable—so why not leverage it for our success?