I picked up the pen with trembling fingers and signed my name. I had nearly signed up to play in the Herbert W. Armstrong women’s basketball league the year before, but I was too afraid. I thought I would be awful, I would fail, and everyone would laugh at me.

Still, I had promised myself that I would sign up for the next season. I nearly lost my nerve again, but my parents strongly encouraged me to do it. So I did.

I lived in mortal dread until our practice—which confirmed my worst fears. I was terrible. I only made one shot the entire practice. It was really embarrassing, and I knew our first game would be even more humiliating. To make matters worse, we only had five players, and our sixth couldn’t play until January. We would have no subs, which didn’t bode well for our team if someone couldn’t play.

The week before our first game passed far too quickly for my liking. A whole week of worrying had put me into such a state of fear that I broke down before we left for the game. I didn’t know where to go, how to get the uniforms—or anything except that I was going to play terribly. My parents encouraged me and told me that it wouldn’t be as bad as I thought. In the back of my mind, I knew they were right, but the fear of what might happen stifled everything else.

When we arrived at the field house, I discovered that the game before ours had started really late, so I had a lot of time to kill. This turned out to be a lifesaver. I had plenty of time to figure out all the things I didn’t know and to calm down.

It was finally time. Our team walked onto our side of the court, and we faced our competitors. That was when I realized that the people we would be playing were my friends, not strangers who would laugh in my face if I made a mistake.

The game was about to start, so I dismissed these comforting thoughts and looked around to see who was going to do the tip-off.

“You do it,” my coach said.

Me?

Apparently, being the tallest girl on our team meant that I had to be center-stage, competing against an AC senior for the tip-off. So much for sliding in under the radar, I thought. In my first real basketball game—my first full-court basketball game—I had to do the tip-off. There was nothing else to do—I stepped up to the ac seal and swatted at the ball, managing somehow to send it to a teammate.

Contrary to my expectations, the game was fun and exciting. At one point, our point-guard passed me the ball, and I shot it. It went in! I was so excited that I literally jumped up and down for joy. I scored again a few minutes later. At the end of the game, our team was victorious. As we lined up to give high-fives, I was really happy.

My mistake in this experience was anticipating failure. I had to do something that I wasn’t really good at, and I just knew that I would fail. Does this sound familiar? Maybe for you it’s a subject you won’t try in because it’s not your best, being an introvert because you think you’ll be rejected, or sitting on the sidelines because you’re not Michael Jordan. The principle is the same.

In Herbert W. Armstrong’s Autobiography , Volume 1, he wrote about the vanity he had when he was a young man. He wrote, “[S]o far, it was pure vanity. But it was a positive vanity, and that might be vastly preferable to a negative, purposeless humility.” This kind of humility is the belief that you are never going to succeed. Instead of attempting to better yourself, this attitude makes you feel like there is no use of even trying. It is the attitude I was struggling with.

Orison Swett Marden wrote a book called He Can Who Thinks He Can. He uses the example of a young man studying to be a lawyer. If this man surrounded himself with a medical atmosphere and spent all his time reading books of medicine, you couldn’t expect him to become a successful lawyer. In the same way, if you surround yourself with an atmosphere of failure, you will never be able to succeed. As Marden says, “The majority of failures begin to deteriorate by doubting or deprecating themselves, or by losing confidence in their own ability …. So long as you carry around a failure atmosphere, and radiate doubt and discouragement, you will be a failure.”

Expecting failure is the road to an unsuccessful life. Marden talks about people who are afraid of trying in case they make a mistake. If you have that attitude, you will pass up valuable opportunities that could help you grow. Everyone fails at something from time to time–you can’t avoid it. But what you can do is accept failure when it comes and use it to drive yourself to succeed the next time. No matter what you’re aiming for, don’t let the fear of failure prevent you from becoming a success.