Start Where You Trip: The Case for Failing Gloriously

Why your first attempt might be awful—and why that’s perfect.

There is a special kind of horror reserved for watching yourself try something for the first time. It is the kind of horror that grips you when you hear a recording of your own voice, or worse, see your own dance moves captured in the unforgiving retina of a smartphone. That’s not me, you think. Surely that’s a computer-generated parody. And yet, there you are: uncoordinated, uncertain, half-drenched in sweat, fully immersed in delusion. It's an exquisite kind of humiliation. And, let me tell you, it’s glorious.

I tripped—metaphorically and very nearly literally—into my first photography vlog not long ago. Armed with a camera I barely knew how to turn on and the sort of optimism normally reserved for cult leaders and toddlers in capes, I hit record. What followed was an assault on cinematic tradition and coherent narration alike. I was out of breath, out of frame, and halfway through my monologue when I realised I’d been speaking to a lens cap.

And yet, something beautiful emerged in the edit: not competence, no, but defiant evidence of a beginning. The kind that reminds you not that you're not there yet, but that you've left somewhere behind.

The notion that failure is something to be avoided is a relatively recent one. In the ancient world, people failed constantly. The Greek gods, who were essentially a reality TV cast with lightning powers, spent most of their time failing—at love, at war, at parenting. And they were worshipped for it. Somewhere along the way, modern culture decided that our first attempts must be dazzling, or else quietly buried beneath a blanket of self-imposed shame and a Google search for “how to fake expertise convincingly.”

This is nonsense, of course. You wouldn’t expect to play Chopin your first time at a piano. You’d expect to sound like a walrus stepping on a cat—and rightly so. The mess is the music. The trip is the start. If you skip the fall, you rob the rise of its story.

What we fear is not the failure itself, but the witness. We imagine a chorus of onlookers, arms crossed, eyebrows raised, ready to call us out as the imposters we already suspect we are. But let me offer a gentle correction: no one is watching. And if they are, they’re mostly relieved it’s not them under the spotlight.

We’ve grown up in a digital age that edits out the awkward beginning. We scroll through curated confidence—people baking flawless loaves of sourdough, running marathons at dawn, speaking Italian while doing their taxes. What we don’t see are the burnt loaves, the shin splints, or the “Ciao, your tax return is overdue.” We see only the polished product, and mistake it for a starting point.

This creates a dangerous mirage. We begin to think the first draft should be good. That the first YouTube video should go viral. That the first run should feel like a montage scene in a sports movie instead of a slow shuffle with frequent gasps and a face like an overheated tomato. The truth, naturally, is the opposite. Your first attempt will likely be bad—cringingly, stomach-turningly bad. And that’s perfect.

There’s a term in aviation called “flying dirty.” It refers to flying with landing gear down, flaps extended—maximum drag, minimal elegance. It’s how planes fly when they’re close to the ground, where precision matters more than performance. It’s not pretty, but it’s how you land.

Starting anything new means flying dirty. It means giving up on the illusion of grace and embracing the grinding, grunting, elbow-bumping effort of learning. It’s the kid on a bike with stabilisers. The amateur guitarist mangling “Wonderwall.” The first pancake that looks like a failed reconstruction of the Moon.

These are sacred rites, and they deserve not mockery but celebration. Because if you’re willing to fail in front of your own ego, you’re halfway to something better than competence—you’re on your way to authenticity. And if you do it gloriously enough, with conviction and just a touch of mad joy, you might even stumble into brilliance by mistake.

My own catalogue of glorious failures now forms a kind of museum of human endeavour gone slightly wrong. There are videos where I look like I’ve just been chased through a hedge. Photos taken with the lens cap still on. Blog posts with titles more promising than the content below them. Each one makes me wince—and smile—because each one is proof that I had the guts to try before I was ready.

So here’s my proposal: fail big. Trip on stage. Stumble in public. Make a noise so utterly daft and off-key that someone looks up and thinks, “At least I’m not that person.” And then, just when the ego is licking its wounds, get up and do it again. Because somewhere in that mess, that wobble, that undeniable humanity, is the start of something genuinely brilliant.

The only real mistake is to sit on the runway, engines off, wondering if you’ll look foolish in flight.

Fly dirty. Start where you trip. Fail gloriously.

And then? Keep going.