Kaj Sotala said:
[I]f you punish yourself for trying and failing, you stop wanting to try in the first place, as it becomes associated with the negative emotions. Also, accepting and being okay with the occasional failure makes you treat it as a genuine choice where you have agency, not something that you're forced to do against your will.
So maybe we should celebrate failed attempts more often ... I for one can't think of anything I've failed at recently, which is probably a sign that I'm not trying enough new things.
So, what specific things have you failed at recently?
I repeatedly fail to reduce the clutter and quantity of unnecessary stuff in my living and working environments. I have too many books, too many clothes, too many unclassified emails, too many file icons on my desktops, too many piles of miscellaneous clutter around my home.
I am not seeking advice about this -- I've read various minimality blogs from time to time, so any advice anyone instantly thinks of is unlikely to be something I haven't seen already. The one thread that I can see running through all of these is a habit of putting something on one side to deal with later, and not dealing with them as fast as they accumulate. But that's a description of the problem, not of a solution.