What would you do if you knew you could not fail.

Okay, so I know this is a just butchered quotation from Robert Frost, but the Disney+ series The Dropout brought it to my attention once again, and I thought the saying demanded further inspection. As one of those people who gets embarrassingly caught up in the media they consume, it is a sentiment that stayed with me long after my flatmate and I finished the series the other week.

What would you do if you knew you could not fail? My immediate answer was ‘become a novelist’. I didn’t really have to think very long or hard about it. Although I’m toiling away with my long-form journalism and short-form prose poetry, I have always thought that I might have a novel in me somewhere - maybe somewhere rattling around the kidneys. If there were no boundaries or limitations to my own talents and labours, I would jump at the chance to sit down and write one. The only thing that puts me off is precisely the thing that puts off all non-novelists; the amount of time and bother it takes to write the damn thing.

But what would you do if you knew you could not fail? Well, the possibilities are, quite frankly, endless. Run for political office? Start a company? Enter the parent-teacher egg-and-spoon race? All worthy ambitions. After all, if you knew you could not fail, you’d barely have to give the thing any serious thought before you’d already achieved it, and how wonderfully freeing that would be. Think of the time you’d save, not actually having to put in any effort. Think of the time you waste, every minute, every hour, every day, trying. It’s a tad tragic, when you think about all the time you’ve flushed down the drain, attempting to navigate this Rubix life we call life.

Of course, in reality, we waste time not failing but simply by doing nothing. Saves us all the frightful rigmarole of getting things wrong. That’s what Disney+ is for – it’s very difficult to fail at Disney+ (although if you’ve seen The World According to Jeff Goldblum, you are most definitely winning). Hence, my flatmate and I spent our evening watching The Dropout instead of trying to achieve any and all of our life’s ambitions. Doing nothing is wonderfully freeing too, because it is devoid of any notion of success and failure. There is no metre stick to measure yourself by when you’re sat on your sofa watching The Dropout, and there is something deeply comforting in that. That’s why so many of us do it.

And it’s not as though we were all busy writing the next Don Quixote before the dawn of on-demand television. I would say that the number of novelists has pretty much stayed at an equilibrium between now and twenty years ago. Maybe a couple of loose cannons have been lost to the bowels of history documentaries on Yesterday, but that’s about it. Because you don’t really write novels because you cannot fail at them – you write them because you cannot see yourself doing anything but. And the same amount of people who love novel-writing now, still loved it when Sky+ was but a whisper in the wind. I must admit, after giving it serious consideration, I bristle at this question – what would you do if you knew you could not fail. For me, it places too much onus on the notion of success. And, despite the press it receives, I don’t honestly think that much has ever got done due to the attainment of success.

Failure is important. As is doing nothing. Separates the wheat from the chaff, to paraphrase Matthew 3:12. But it goes deeper than that – it sounds cheesy, but there’s something wonderfully life-affirming, heroic even, about doing something that you know you will fail at but doing it anyway. I think that that is far more admirable than doing something fully in the knowledge that you will succeed at it. The question – of what you would do if you knew you could not fail – is flawed because it takes no notice of the importance of everything we do to get to where we want to be. Whether that’s running for political office, starting a company, or simply winning an egg-and-spoon race; it is the botched attempts and false start penalties that define us, and make our eventual success all the sweeter. Although I say this through the gritted teeth of somebody who’s trying to become a successful writer and failing at every turn, it is simply the act of writing that fulfils me. If you told me I would never succeed at it, I’m pretty sure I’d continue doing it. Although maybe it’d become a lazy Sunday activity, rather than the life and soul of my entire existence.

I think the question we should be asking ourselves, other than what we would do if we knew we could not fail is, thus; what would you do if you knew you would never succeed? By removing the husk of soulless ambition, you’re left with the kernel of joy and happiness and unadulterated passion and all that. The answer for most of us still may be, sitting down and watching the tele. The answer for me is still – write a novel. But I must admit, it might take me longer to get started on chapter one. I’ve still got the whole of Disney+ to get through, and I’m afraid that does take top priority.