The concept of failure

August 16th, 2008 • Related • Filed Under

I’ve been thinking a lot about this over the last few days and while I was out running today, all the pieces finally snapped together in my head.

Many times in my past I’ve felt like a failure at one thing or another.  It starts out by failing at something specific I was trying to do and then I would take it personally.  Instead of looking specifically at what I was trying to do, I focused instead on myself.  Instead of failing at X, I was a failure.

Sounds like a pretty productive frame of mind huh?

When I started all this over a year ago, I changed the way I thought about failure.  I realized that the whole concept of failure is only as negative as I let it be.  If I fail at something and choose not to learn from it and take it personally, then it’s bad.  If I look at what happened logically, learn from it and adapt then it was a good thing.

Now, whenever I feel myself slipping back to that old thought process, my inner dialogue kicks in automatically and tells me to stop, take a minute to think about what I should learn and then do that next time.  There will always be a next time - I think the idea of a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity is bull shit.

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