Turn on the light

Last night, at around 3AM, my 3 year old daughter woke me with several pokes to the shoulder.

"Mom!"

"Go back to bed," I told her, still half asleep.

"But mom, there's a spider in my room!"

I tried to convince her that there were no spiders in there, that spiders are our friends (a stretch I know, but I really value my sleep...). She wasn't buying it.

I finally got up and stumbled after her to her room.

"See?" she said pointing up. "It's right there!"

She was pointing to the ceiling fan. In the dim light cast by the nightlight, it did present a somewhat menacing sillouhette.

"That would be a pretty big spider! But see, it's just your fan," I told her as I turned on the light.

I think sometimes fear of failure looks like a giant spider in the dark. It can paralyze us with fear. But once we accept that sometimes we'll fail, it's like turning on the light to find it's just a ceiling fan. It's not as bad as we originally thought.

Don't let fear of failure keep you from sharing your ideas. Some of them will fail. Some of them will be bad. But just turn on the light and push through it.