Let yourself fall down more

A personal reflection on how fear of failure holds us back from learning and improving. Using inline skating as a central metaphor, the author argues that committing fully—even at the risk of falling—leads to faster skill development. Examples from voice lessons, saxophone, and poetry writing illustrate how embracing failure across different disciplines unlocks rapid improvement. The key insight: low-stakes failures are rarely as dangerous as the anxiety around them, and that anxiety itself causes the failures we fear.