Imagine tearing it all down.
Imagine starting over without any memory of who you were, any recollection of what you learned or experienced to this point in life, other than your ability to read and write.
Unburdened by the accomplishments or failures of your past, unweighted by expectations for your future.
Unshackled from who you’ve been and what you’ve done.
Some people do this, but it’s not the norm.
It’s more common to seek to leverage our past into our future — to use our past experience as the foundation for the next thing.
The Downside of Leveraging the Past
For sure, there is value in leveraging skills and accomplishments from one area into another.
But it also comes at a price. The more successes you have in your past, the harder it becomes to embrace failure in the present.
The expectation that past success in one endeavor should lead to success in the next endeavor can be a paralyzing force, keeping us from taking action that might break open locked doors, for fear that those actions won’t work.
This creates our suffering.
The Freedom to Abolish the Past
… all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. – Declaration of Independence
This is my favorite line from the Declaration of Independence.
The founding fathers were astute observers of human behavior and our tendency to stay in suffering rather than embrace change.
Their argument — their fundamental raison d’etre in creating a new form of government — was that when the system isn’t working we must abolish it.
It’s worth noting that the “republic” created at the founding of the United States was an experiment. The founding fathers had no guarantees that this form of government would work.
The boldness of the founding fathers in issuing the Declaration of Independence was not really in declaring “freedom” from the sovereignty of the king. This was not the first revolution.
Rather, their boldness was in discarding the structures of the past and embarking on an experiment in governance with no guarantee of success.
This is the unheralded freedom of Independence Day:
The freedom to fail.
The freedom to get it wrong.
Imagine the Freedom to Fail
Imagine the freedom to begin something new unburdened by the past, instead of trying to use the past as a foundation for the next thing.
In a culture so focused on success and expertise, it can be hard to embrace the idea of being a beginner, of fumbling for the answers, of not knowing.
This is how we can become prisoners of our own past.
What would you do if you embraced the freedom to fail?
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