Today would have been Julia Child’s 100th birthday, so a lot of videos and photos of her are floating around the Trending Internet Ether.

One of the video clips I’ve seen today is this vote of reassurance from Miss Julia, which could just as easily apply to any new or difficult endeavor, whether it be making a soufflé or a beurre blanc, attempting to complete a novel, driving a stick-shift with your mother hollering at you from the shotgun passenger seat, or, um, raising $5K to fight AIDS/HIV and training to ride 300 miles in three days on a bicycle:

All we can do is practice, fail, practice some more, get better at failing, practice. Again. And again. It’s a useful perspective.

La cuisinière chez Martinet, depicting a woman wearing an outfit made of cooking implements. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

For many years, I think I truly believed that the most important sign of achievement—in any arena—was the fact of that thing coming easily. The problem with this line of rather haughty thinking is that very little learning or education is actually involved; it more or less confines one only to pursuits in which natural or innate skill, talent, aptitude—whatever you want to call the stuff with which you were born—make base-level success almost effortless. In fact, the logical extension of this faulty belief is that if you have to work at it, whatever “it” is, you suck, you’ll never be good enough, and you should hang it up right now.

Being good at something as a novice is very satisfying, of course, a balm to the ego if nothing else, but without practice and discipline, and yes, failure, dreaded dreaded failure, that preliminary talent doesn’t get any of us very far, nor does it push us to stretch ourselves. Making Talent, that most elusive and mysterious of elixirs, a prerequisite for our future choices and callings is also a pretty effective way to stop oneself from trying anything new.

Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

How dull and predictable we’d all be in such a world. The creativity and innovation that comes from testing out unknown waters, and flailing and floundering and failing miserably, wouldn’t exist.

When I find myself in some mental tailspin about failing, or not being where I’d like to be, as I so often do—not only about cycling and athletic goals, but about almost everything I care about—some part of me remembers that failure and the related disappointments are supposed to come with the territory. It’s called education. Bon appétit.