April 13th , Daily Drop

Failing forward.

We have all inevitably failed at things in life. We will all fail again in the future if we are people who try new things.

There’s an old saying “ the master has failed more times than the beginner has ever tried”. Let’s reflect on that for a moment.

I’ve failed many times at many things, each time i’ve learned something valuable. We shouldn’t fear failure. Something much worse is to live a life worried about the opinions of others, never truly exploring what we enjoy and are gifted at.

We all have gifts, things that were naturally called to. They draw us in, we can spend hours working on these things without noticing the time. In order to find these inner gifts and give them to the world, it will take trial and error.

It will take failing. trying things that you don’t enjoy and maybe aren’t good at. This will be the test, do we stay in our comfort zone and keep living menial lives doing tasks that don’t fulfill us all day. Or do we decide the only way to truly fail is to give up.

When we shift our perspective we see that each fail is a toll on the road to success. Every loss can be a lesson if we choose to frame it that way.

If our ego prevents us from being able to laugh at ourselves and move with lighthearted energy, then failing at something can feel catastrophic. The ego wants to protect it’s identity so it will try to keep us in our know comfort zone.

But change happens in the unknown. We’re not likely to get new outcomes from repeating the same behaviours. For things to change, we need to make change. And with change comes unfamiliarity and the possibility of failing.

So let’s use every fail as fuel, we see it as a sign that we’re pursuing a life of meaning and we’re not settling for the same old same old.

Now here’s a caveat, we don’t always need to be failing for the sake of character development. That would not be very wise. We should always be diligent to avoid situations that could cause serious harm, emotionally, physically, financially, etc. Certain situations are hard to come back from and should be avoided for the sake of ourselves and loved ones.

We avoid obvious pitfalls, we learn from the mistakes of others, we don’t repeat the same mistakes. We learn from our previous missteps and apply that knowledge moving forward.

But when we inevitably do fail at something, big or small, that is the moment when we have a decision to make, do we let it destroy us? Or do we get back up, knock off the dust and take another step forward?

When we use failing as a metric that we’re trying new things, we can begin to fail forward. Each time we fail we learn something new, devise a plan to avoid that mistake in the future and we keep moving. The only way to actually fail is to never try, or to give up on ourselves and settle for less than we’re capable of.