Failure, Success, or Just Labels?

It is interesting to remember that in our early years of life, we maneuvers through an extensive trial and error obstacle course in learning how to walk and talk, eat, count, and take care of our personal hygiene. My golly, we even mastered a whole "foreign" language. Yet in that continuous error-learning process, we were truly "clever" enough not to have labeled those millions of attempts as "failures".

In fact, in those days, we were "smart" enough not to label them anything at all. They were just feedback through which we learned to successfully speak a foreign language(s), walk, talk, eat, and a multitude of operations that required dexterity and coordination and activation of mental pathways.

As we grew and matured, we have now learned how to label things and one of the most used labels for too many of us is the label of "failure". We attempt something new once, maybe even half-heartedly ("knowing" in advance that success is minimal) and then we give up. And too often we then label ourselves and our attempts as "failures".

So it is good to remember once in a while how we did learn a whole slew of new things and never once labeled them as failures. It is a thought to be well kept in mind that we either choose no labels (as we once wisely did) or if we have to, to choose useful and enabling labels for ourselves and others. It is no coincidence that researchers and scientists confirm that a human being learns the best and the most up to the age of 5 or 7. Perhaps it is not our brains that are not able to learn at the same voracious rate but rather the roadblocks (usually in the form of self-labels) we learn along the way that slows us down.