Congratulations! Now forget everything you learned in school.

Congratulations on your recent graduation! Take this time to be proud of yourself; graduating college is an impressive accomplishment and you have worked very hard to get here.

That being said, school doesn't teach you everything. In fact, many things that were drilled into my brain for 20 years were actually counter-productive to a happy post-college adulthood.

Let's start with the biggest culprit: Failing is bad.

Truth: Failing is great. In fact, failing is the #1 thing you should strive for. You should strive to fail every single day. In fact, multiple times a day is ideal. You should fail so frequently that it becomes the norm. Why? Because you won't ever be your most successful self without trying new things, pushing yourself, and inevitably, failing all the time.

When I was younger I didn't push myself, apply myself, or get out of my comfort zone because I was afraid of failing. I was afraid of not getting into prestigious colleges so I didn't apply to any. I was afraid of getting rejected so I didn't ask someone out. I was afraid of not making the cross country team so I didn't show up to tryouts. I was afraid of looking dumb so I didn't attend improv classes. Everything I did was safe and without fear of failure. And that left me to stay in my comfort zone, where nothing really changed and I stopped growing as a person.

The good news is that failing, along with everything else in life, is something that you can practice. Aim to fail miserably at one thing right now. How about pushups to failure? Whether it is 2 or 200, you will fail at some point. How you feel when failing will tell you how much you need to work on strengthening your fail muscle (and your arm muscles too!). But when you do pushups every morning for the next week or two, before long instead of "ah crap I hate pushups this sucks and I'm going to suck at it" your attitude will transform into "34 pushups, alright! That's 5 more than yesterday."

One question I always ask when interviewing is "tell me about a recent time where you failed at something." This question is an uncanny predictor of those that get hired: "Haha just one recent thing? I can't even pick...." vs "Ummm.. can't think of anything. I'm awesome." No, you aren't; you just told me you don't challenge yourself and guess what - I'm not hiring you.

TLTR: Failing is not only a good thing but the key to growth in all aspects of life. Make an effort to do something every single day that you will completely and utterly fail at. It will be scary. It won't be fun at first. In fact it may completely suck. But keep at it and it will be 100% worth it. Now go do some pushups.

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