Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Failure

I have found that often when I ask people what they want to do with the next five years of their life, they shrug, laugh nervously and mumble something that often sounds  like, "I don't know..."

Often (not always) when I change the question and ask...

If you could do anything...
   ...and you knew it would not fail...
               ...What would you do?

The response is different.   Even if the person does not have a ready answer, often there is a smile of relief, a tilted head and the dreaming begins...

We find it easy to dream when the possibility of failure disappears.

What's tragic about this is the fact that we cannot grow without failure...   we cannot learn without failure...

I think I've only ever failed one test/exam in my entire life...   (I know, I know... get over it...)

The thing is a test/exam is not life!  

What I mean is this.   Before I ever sat to write the test or exam I spent hours learning how to get the right answer.   Hours erasing and trying again.   Hours squinting my eyes and trying to remember elusive facts, dates, formulas and the like...   In other words... for every right exam question I logged hours of failures.

If you could do anything and you knew you would not fail... whatever it is would be the failure.  

Success cannot exist apart from the possibility of failure.   In other words, if the thing cannot fail... it cannot succeed either.   If the only time an athlete competes is when success is guaranteed they aren't competing.   If the only time a business tries a new product is when its success is guaranteed it's not a new product...

Success and failure are the two inseparable sides of the same coin...

Want some advice?   If you do anything and it "fails" (whatever that means) get up and go at it again until you figure out how to get that coin to land success-side up!

…just sayin…

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