Fail Better

Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
- Samuel Beckett

“Fail better”. I like that. It appeals to me. That portion of the quote is the part that got me to keep it in my quotes list. It gets to the heart of the matter, really. That there is no true failure other than to give up. You go off a diet? Get back on (or make a lifestyle change, which is better, but people have been arguing about that for a while). Next time you fall off the wagon, eat one bag of potato chips instead of two. Or eat just the potato chips, forget the dip. Or drink down a glass of lemonade with your binge instead of the soda. When you fall off the wagon this time, make it better than last time.

Are you trying to quit smoking? Did you have a cigarette today anyway? Okay. You smoked a cigarette. That does not change that you are trying to quit smoking unless you let it. Don’t let it. Let it be a small failure, a stumbling block along the way to being a non-smoker. It doesn’t have to be the end of your journey to being a non-smoker, just a flat tire. Change the flat tire and continue on the journey. Don’t let a single flat tire stop you in achieving your goal. Don’t let a hundred flat tires stop you. It isn’t important that you become a non-smoker this month versus three years from now. What’s important is that you become a non-smoker at all.

Don’t give up. Use each time as a way of making your change better.

Smoking – why did you smoke that cigarette? Were you hanging around with Joan again, and she took you to that bar where they still allow people to smoke indoors and it all just looked so good? Don’t go there. Find a different bar that doesn’t allow people to smoke. And if Joan insists that you go to that bar, do something else with Joan. Let Joan smoke on her own time, and when she’s with you, do something else. It could be that Joan’s a huge amount of fun when she’s at a bar, and you really really enjoy the adventures and hijinks you guys get into when the two of you are at a bar. Do you enjoy it more than you enjoy the benefits of not smoking? Maybe you’ll need to find a compromise. Maybe there are other adventures – non-smoking adventures – to be had. Perhaps there are adventures with other people to be had. Maybe you’ll have to figure out how not to smoke when you’re in that bar (you can practice without Joan, that way you can leave when the craving becomes overwhelming). Or maybe you’ll decide that you can smoke, but only with Joan, and only at that bar. It’s up to you. Use this “failure” as a lesson in what causes you to smoke, and avoid those triggers, or figure out a different way to satisfy whatever gets satisfied by smoking. Then, next time, you can fail better.

Eating – why did you eat the two bags of potato chips with dip and a soda? Perhaps it was dinner time, and you didn’t feel like cooking? Or you would have cooked if there had been any food in the house and clean dishes with which to cook? Maybe you were feeling bad and needed some comfort food. Maybe you were watching a movie on TV, and you always eat potato chips when you watch a movie on TV. There are ways to change these “problems”. They aren’t really problems afterall, just excuse-riddled issues that can be resolved. Invest in some frozen dinners, and you’ll always have something to cook for dinner. Check out Flylady (see links to the right) and her link to Saving Dinner, which will teach you how to shop for food and cook easy meals. Or if you don’t like their system, find another one. Type in “menu planning” into Yahoo or Google or whatever you use, and you’ll find plenty of options. Some of them will even include shopping lists for their menus, so you’ll always have the right food on hand (if you go shopping, that is). If you don’t have the money, check out their free samples and supplement it with a trip to the library for some of the books. No clean dishes? Flylady can help with that, too (unless, like in my household, dishes are someone else’s chore, in which case, you’ll just have to suck it up). Or, make doing dishes more interesting. Get a mini TV and put it into your kitchen so you can watch it while you do dishes. Invest in some chocolate covered cherries (or some other small, delicious treat), and you can have one (just one!) if and only if you do a load of dishes – from putting in the dirty ones to setting up the dishwasher to drying and putting away the clean ones. Or use some non-food reward if it’d work better for you. Comfort food is tougher. There aren’t a whole lot of substitutes, food-wise, for comfort food. You can find healthier alternatives, of course. The internet can help you there. Or perhaps you can find something else that’s comforting. A walk. A phone call to a good friend. Hand-writing a letter to someone who cares. A good cry. A pet. If you always eat when you’re watching a movie, change what you eat. The experts suggest raw vegetables. I have to tell you, I don’t like celery raw. It’s one of the most frequently heard vegetables, one of the most common for me, that you ought to eat. It’s good for you and you can add peanut butter on it and it has next to no calories (or something like that). Yay. I don’t care. I don’t like the stringiness of it, and I don’t find the taste worth the investment of time to de-string the celery. It’s taken me a long time to realize this. But you know what I do like? Radishes. Particularly when they’re cut into halves and quarters, because then you can eat just part of a radish, if you want. Some of the radishes I get at the grocery store are huge, and I don’t want to eat a whole one. But, if I take five minutes, I can wash and cut up an entire bag of radishes and have it ready to eat over the next several days (which is about how long it’d take me to eat a small bag of radishes). Maybe it’s neither radishes nor celery for you. Perhaps you prefer beets or turnips or cucumbers or any of a number of other things. Just find something you will eat (not just can, but will), and eat that instead of potato chips, or eat half vegetables and half potato chips, or something. Just so you eat healthier now than you were eating a year ago. That’s all you have to do. Some experts say eat 4-6 servings of fruit a day. Some experts say eat 1-2 servings of fruit a day because of the sugar content. I say, if it takes fruit to keep you from eating a candy bar, then eat fruit. Because fruit will be better for you. And raw fruit that isn’t in a can or in syrup. Preferably with the skin on. But if not, so be it. If the only way you eat fruit is out of a can with heavy syrup, better that than some of the junk you could be eating. And you can modify that as you want. Light syrup. Experimenting with other fruits that are easier to eat raw. Whatever it takes for you to eat healthier today than you did a year ago, because who you are today is the only competition you need.

As for everything else, the theory’s the same. Figure out why you’re doing the “bad habit”, and then stop or alter the “why”. Do you go out to have sex with miscellaneous stranger Q the day after you talk on the phone with your controlling parents, every time you talk with your parents? Stop talking with your parents. Write them a letter instead, and if they call, say you have someone coming over. Don’t let them control you. You are wonderful and amazing, and you are in control of yourself, not them. Does Bob buy you a drink whenever you see him down by the bar and he refuses to buy you any of the “pansy stuff” as he refers to the non-alcoholic knock-offs? Tell him no. Or if he’s one of those overly-sensitive types who can’t take no for an answer, make a deal with the bartender sometime when Bob’s not around – when Bob buys you a drink, make it a non-alcoholic one that just looks like alcohol. What Bob doesn’t know won’t hurt you (though are you sure you want to hang around someone who wants to control your drinking habits in that manner?). Do hours fly by whenever you’re on the computer to the extent that you forget to clean the house or do the dishes or pick up your husband from the airport or sleep and other things like that? Don’t get on the computer until you’ve done “enough” for the day, and then reward yourself with computer time. Or get one of those electronic plug-in timers where it’ll turn something on or off at a particular time (like people get for lights when they go away on vacation). Attach it to your computer and set it for a time you definitely need to be off the computer by. If you want to save your work, you’ll have to get off the computer by that time, or at least pause long enough to hit ctrl-S or press the “save game” button in the menu. That’s a bit drastic, though, and it could be damaging to your computer if you space out again and the computer suddenly gets “unplugged”. Better to set a timer like an egg-timer next to you on the computer desk and stop when it goes off. Or within 5 minutes of when it goes off so that you have time to save your game or your work or whatever. The temptation to just reset the timer because “it’s still early” or “traffic should be light, I’ll have enough time” or “I’ll do it tomorrow” will be very strong. But you can be stronger. And if not, take some even more drastic measures and uninstall that piece of software that is eating up your life. Just as the sex-addict shouldn’t let her parents control her, you don’t need to have the computer controlling you. You deserve a full and happy life, and there is more to life than computer.

Find out why you are “failing” and use that to fail better next time. If you do that, then you have no failures, just lessons. Good luck.