There's one thing you learn the first time you step on a skateboard. Concrete is hard. To commit to the act of skateboarding is to accept that you're going to spend a lot of time on the ground. But after a few weeks of bruised shins and sore wrists, I had a realization. Consequences are powerful.
In skateboarding, the consequence of failure is falling, and falling is often painful. Like every new skateboarder, I've been learning how to ollie. Jumping off the ground, with your board obediently following underfoot, is a beautiful balance of timing, precision, and force. There's no easy way to learn to ollie, and the incremental improvement required to train the split-second motion into your body means you're going to fail a lot.
The first couple of weeks looked bleak, with more time spent on the ground than on the board. But, after a few weeks my body began adapting to the motion. I was falling less and getting the board into the air more often. The painful consequences of failing led to a rapid iteration of a skill set, quickly building entirely new capabilities.
Your focus on an action is directly correlated with the intensity of its consequences. When you know something will hurt if you get it wrong, you don't have time for distraction. And this focus not only leads to better output but also to better improvement. Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson coined the term deliberate practice, a state of practice where you focus on your weaknesses, actively identifying and improving your errors. He noted that musicians who had a deliberate practice routine were more successful than musicians with a similar skill level and time invested.
When the consequences of a mistake are notable, you naturally embody the principles of deliberate practice. Take bouldering as another example. During bouldering, the ground underneath you is padded, which significantly reduces the chance of injury. However, your mind still perceives the risk of falling, and when you make a mistake climbing, you'll often fall. Every fall acts as a mental bookmark, cataloging what went wrong and why. This instant feedback cycle allows you to repeat the action that led up to the mistake, forming new physical and mental capabilities in response to your previous failures.
Consequences don't have to be physical to be effective. When playing music for an audience, your sensitivity towards mistakes is heightened. The fear of making a song-halting error is palpable, and while there aren't any physical consequences, you still feel it within your body. It's in these high-pressure moments, surrounded by the expectations of other musicians and the crowd in front of you, that you can access another, otherwise unattainable, level of quality. No matter how intensely you practice, until you're on stage with immediate consequences behind your actions, you'll never get a true measure of what you're capable of.
Of course, the risk of failure, and the consequences of doing something wrong, can act as a dissuading friction to trying something new. Self-doubt is a powerful force, especially when confronting the unknown. What will people think? How will I recover? Is this even possible? There's only one way to answer these questions: by heading straight at what you're afraid of and seeing what happens when things go astray.
Therein lies the beauty of action with consequences. During the act of learning and exploring something new, you're bound to experience dozens of mistakes. By continually grappling with the consequences of your errors, you inoculate yourself against the fear of failure. This is how you build the mental resilience required to have confidence when tackling bigger challenges.
Human nature has been tuned over millennia by adventure and adversity. As we continue to optimize our lives around comfort and ease, we only increase our sensitivity to the friction of potential failure. But when you go after a big enough goal, you can harness your internal fears to be a powerful driver for behavior. This is why signing up for a race is great motivation to train harder. It's a lot easier to go for an early morning run when you feel the fear of suffering and failing in the upcoming race.
Doing hard things is hard, but the difficulty is what propels an equivalently strong reaction. You have to fully commit. Going in halfway is to invite failure, and because the consequences of failing feel so undesirable, you are that much more invested in seeing it through.
Consequences are a signal for being on the boundaries of your current capabilities, a positive sign that you're on the path of active development. Seek out consequences and your capabilities will follow.