While sitting in line for the ATM the other day, one of my best friends and I were having a little discussion about relationships and the motives behind them. As we pulled up to the machine, he said something I’ve been thinking about ever since, and I thought I’d share it with you. After listening to me whine about all the worries and doubts I had about graduating next year and what I shouldn’t be doing with my life, he looked at me and said, “There are always a million reasons not to do something.” It didn’t strike me as profound at first, but the more I thought about it the more I realized the wisdom behind it.

We are all rapidly approaching a point in our lives where we are going to have to make some big decisions. What do I want to do once I leave college? Where do I want to live? How do I want to get to that point? These questions are of course important, but there’s a deeper question here all of us are continually trying to answer: What kind of person do I want to be? Regardless of whether or not you’re actively thinking about it, you’re answering this question every day with every decision you make.

So then why do we hesitate? No one wants to face the bear that is their reality five years from now. Heck, I don’t even want to think about what I have to do after I finish writing this article. Why? I think it’s because we all quake at one universal truth of life: the fear of failure.

This notion is something so intimately familiar to everyone I’m not even going to spend time describing it to you. It paradoxically drives us to succeed while simultaneously causing us to doubt ourselves and stall the big decisions. But what too many people don’t realize in this world is the simple truth failure is the most important thing that can and will happen to you.

I can’t put it any better than Michael Jordan: “I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I've taken the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” Success is cheap. You can overlook a lot of small mistakes if the end result is positive. But failure forces you to really look at everything you did wrong, and at this point you have a simple choice: you can either fix your errors or forget about them. The only way to become a better person is to objectively look at where you fell short, change your behaviors and succeed the next time. It’s how we grow into the person we truly want to become.

I don’t care what you say, life is not about restraint. Every chance you don’t take, every time you decide to back away, every time you walk the well-worn road to easy street, every time you convince yourself not to do something, a little piece of you which could have existed is gone forever. Don’t let it happen ever again.

Go crash and burn. Get shot down by that hot girl in your Econ class. Go interview for that job that you are totally unqualified for. Stop thinking “what if” and make what you want a reality. Along the way you will fall, and when you do, get back up giddy at the idea the person you are today is one step closer to who you know you can be tomorrow.