RSSTHIS MONTH IN DISCOVERY GIRLS : DARE YOURSELF TO FAIL
April 4, 2008
Embarking on the unknown road that will lead to success is not daunting. Not knowing what form that success might take is not demoralizing either. The real fear, the only fear, for me, lies in the event that I will walk this road to find that it leads nowhere.
Searching for a way.
Part of me fundamentally believes that that is not possible. My other part, hopefully a smaller size than the first, is not so sure. Though my intention is to shape my own future, rather than just react to the things that might happen to me, I’m not always operating at full intentional power.
Discovery Girls
As I sit with my tea and the ever-present dog, at 5AM and search around in my head for what’s going on and what I need to work on, what do I spot on the cover of Discovery Girls Apr/May 08 issue but a feature entitled “Dare Yourself To Fail: Don’t Get Stuck at Go”. From there, this article was conceived.
Discovery Girls magazine.
For those of you not familiar with DG, this is a magazine for girls ages 8 & up, published every 2 months. My daughters are 12 and 14, and when each issue arrives, my child count is reduced from 3 to 2 because 1 girl is buried in her room with the magazine for the next 4 hours.
The writing style sounds like that of their best friend or a cool 18yr old, but certainly not parent or anyone over 20. If I offered the same guidance, they would tell me I sounded preachy and clearly didn’t understand their problem. It sounds too cliché, or too much like a lecture, coming from me. When they read it here, they soak up every word.
Responsible media
Winner of many parenting awards, the magazine succeeds in perfectly spanning what the girls want to read about and what I want them to read. It is aimed at cultivating and supporting the power and potential of girls.
In each issue, a group of real girls from around the US are featured. Their faces appear on the cover as well, instead of a dolled-up celebrity. They look, dress, and behave appropriately. Apart from heavy use of a hair straightener and a little gloss, they are as unadorned as they should be. There is enough media promoting resemblance to teenage prostitutes without adding more to the mix.
Teenage girls from DG magazine.
Here, they’re dressed in the clothes you hope they’d come back with if you gave them $40 and sent them to the mall. There is no Prada anything. Girls find affordable fashion, a celebrity feature that offers role model advice the kids accept, quizzes (Are You Too Shy) and the ever-popular Embarrassing Moments. For $US 20/year, this is the cheapest and best babysitter around. The marketing is minimal.
The website is worth a look as well. The homepage is entirely age- appropriate, with polls, a blog, a diary, and other interactive highlights.
Allow yourself failure
My kids LOVE American Idol. I go to bed because the screaming audience makes me edgy. I must admit that I quite like Simon (no, I don’t mean, like like, in the Grade 7 sense). Each of the 3 judges is a great foil for the others, but his words have the most substance. I hope that in his private life, he has a little more humanity and realizes that on Idol, he is being paid as an actor as well as a judge.
This article, entitled “Dare Yourself To Fail : Don’t Get Stuck at Go”, begins with the story of Jennifer Hudson who won the Academy Award for Dreamgirls. She was voted off Idol after receiving the 2nd lowest number of votes 2 in 3 times. Now, 13-yr old readers are hooked.
Some of the advice includes the ideas of changing The Voice Inside Your Head, and Change Your View where you have the choice to see failure as just that, or as something more, namely a step on your road to success. My own favorite was You Define You, which was about ignoring other people’s expectations and limitations regarding You.
These are the ideas that benefit everyone. My kids have heard them from me, but you know the reality of parenthood… they don’t listen to a word you say, but they watch and memorize every move you make. When they hear it here, they’re listening.
The lesson : NEVER GIVE UP
Only by failing repeatedly can you succeed hugely. Where the road leads, who can know? I love the idea that girls can learn at an early age to take some control of their future. Life becomes mundane if you’re just waiting for the next thing to react to.
Like anything, the more you fail, the less each failure matters. You can get better at it! If you got a flat tire each time you drove somewhere, flat tires would cease to have much impact
This is how Winston Churchill said it :
“This is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”
—HarrowSchool, 29 October 1941.
He also said that “success is the ability to go from one failure to the next with no loss of enthusiasm”. His quotations are among the most brilliant, very much what you wish you’d said yourself, and like to think you would have if given a couple more minutes. Take a minute and read more of them here.
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