“What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?”

That question is irrelevant to me and should be irrelevant to others. I don’t think failure should be avoided or can be avoided.

In the insurance field risk was defined as “uncertainty concerning the chance of a loss.” Risk avoidance is not a healthy strategy and I don’t recommend risk avoidance as a way to go through life.

Wanting to be certain at all times that things will work out or that you won’t fail will keep you stuck and unable to move on.

Like I said I failed big time in my twenties and early thirties. I was laid off from four out of the five jobs I held from 1990 to 1997.

The catch is: you don’t always know you’re making a mistake when you choose to do something. This kind of trial-and-error can be minimized yet it can’t always be prevented.

You can scroll down to read one of my earliest blog entries here about how you can take the CareerMatchmaker quiz on the CareerCruising database that is available at the Brooklyn Public Library website and might be available at your library’s website. Possibly you can type CareerMatchmaker into the search box on the right to be taken to this blog entry.

Or you can go on the MyNextMove website to take a free career quiz.

The fear of failure doesn’t have to motivate a person to back out of doing something.

In fact I did not know I would succeed when I went back to school to become a librarian. Yet I was willing to try most of all because the therapist had given me true career counseling thus from the start I had a better chance of succeeding.

Failure is what it is: a mistake to learn from so you don’t make the same mistake again.

The more risks you take the more confidence you get.