I have failed at my intention to photograph the 260 elephants scattered all over London - (spotted one at the Elephant and Castle as I passed by on a bus to Camberwell today). My excuse is that I hadn’t realized that they were going to be moved today to various places – I understand there are to be elephant ‘parades’ at the new shopping centre in Shepherd’s Bush and the Royal Chelsea Hospital, so maybe I can redeem myself there. Trouble is there will probably be masses of people and the elephants may be all mixed up so that I won’t know which ones I have photographed. Ah well – nobody forced me to decide to photograph them all so the failure is all my own. Anyway, I hope to put a slide show on my blog of the ones I have got as soon as I have worked out how to do it! But here's a picture of another two elephant until I manage that.
Thinking about failure – I attended a course last year called ‘Fear of Failure’ which was far more interesting than I had anticipated. Indeed I still have a little notice over my desk saying, ‘There is no failure; only feedback’ which I took back from it. We (that is those of us on the course) came to the conclusion that we often don’t attempt something because of our fear of failure/being laughed at or scorned.
Looking back over my childhood I remember not seriously trying at sport, for instance, because my older brother and sister were so good and I might not be … Interestingly, my younger sister told me than an English teacher she was taught by a couple of years after me told her that I was brilliant at English, the implication being that he expected much the same of her. (Why didn’t teachers then seem to understand the psychology of those who, far from being pushed to succeed by such behaviour, might not even try!) Perhaps I am unusually stubborn, but I don’t like being compared with other people, especially not other members of my family. We all have our strengths and our weaknesses – we are just different!!!
