Habits and Failure
Posted: 11-17-2025 | Updated: 11-22-2025
Game Development is something that I've had my eyes on since elementary, and especially in the middle of my highschool life. While I don't think I have great game ideas in my head, just the thought of 'creating' a video game sounds very inspiring in many ways. The idea that I could create music on my own, or create graphics and artwork on my own, or even a story on my own sounds interesting and almost fulfilling, that I could create an "experience" in other words. It comes as no surprise that the mere act of 'learning' is a habit of mine, as simply learning new things lets me have more potential in creating something using my growing knowledge.
However, there is an obvious flaw to this line of thinking, I tend to easily get overwhelmed and experience great levels of discomfort in my work or in learning something new. Recently, I've come to accept that to learn new things, I have to accept that I will fail. Failure is not a big deal, especially if there's no tangible punishment for failing (which applies to learning a new habit or a new skill), but it is difficult to not think of failure as big deal when a person for example is mistake-averse, or has "done well" in many things that failing something feels hurtful somehow.
But to learn something new, I realized that I have to experience several failures, both inconsequential kinds of failiures, and the more scary kinds of failures. Perhaps developing a habit to embrace discomfort and failure that we cannot truly control is crucial to continue moving forward.
After all, you can make a whole bullet list of things you've done like:
- completing courses
- creating projects
- achieving benchmarks
But there will always be something to improve, something that is lacking.
In creating art or music, I've only developed the very basics while studied by myself during highschool. College did not give much way to further studies in these habits because I had to prioritize coding or software development. And learning these skills, art, music, writing, gamedev, are fun! Until failure builds up and piles up along with insecurities. To move, I must accept failure. To improve and become an expert, I need to accept the discomfort of not understanding a concept. And especially, I need to accept that time is always moving forward, that mistakes cast cannot be undone/reverted, and that I can only learn as I move forward.