Failure

• You will suck at something.
• Failure is a lesson.
• Bring the lessons forward.
• Mistakes happen. Not learning from the mistake is the real mistake.
• You will lose, but what did you learn?
• Strength Comes From A Wound
• Life is suffering, but only if you let it be.
• You can fail at something you don’t love, so you might as well work at something you do love.

One of the best ways to learn in life, and have those lessons stick, is to fail.

People think failure is bad, and in some cases it is, but the vast majority of times it’s progress disguised as defeat.

Think of a baby, learning to walk. They spend hours falling down, stumbling, and generally scaring the life out of their parents. But each failure teaches the baby something. They aren’t consciously thinking about it, but they are learning. If I hold onto the table, I can stand up. If I hold daddy’s hands, I can stand up. If I take a step or two, I can get closer to that thing I want.

You Will Suck

Life for all of us is the same. The first time you do calculus, you’re going to suck. The first time you drive, you’re going to suck. The first time you do anything, you’re going to suck. But that’s all part of learning. Failure is the path to success.

• I have failed at 7 different business ideas that have cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars, not to mention tons of time.
• I failed to make it to the NHL.
• I failed to run a marathon in under 3:30.
• I fail to remember things every day.

But I do have four successful businesses, and I’m working on my 5th and 6th. I still play hockey and get to spend time with friends, and I’m getting better at remembering. In addition to that I’m getting better at being a leader, and yet I still fail all the time.

Does that make me a ‘failure’? No, but I sure have learned a lot.

Selective Memory

One of the things that happens as you get older is you only remember the highlights, and failures, from your past.

You don’t remember where you were on any given Tuesday in 1987, 1997, 2007, or even three Tuesdays ago. It’s when something major happens, that warrants a story that you remember.

It’s those stories you tell yourself that you remember, and surprisingly, the stories may not line up with the reality of what actually happened. You also remember the disasters, the failures, much more than you remember the successes.

I think this is genetic, to allow us to survive. It was much more important to remember that snake is poisonous, so we could survive another day.

This excellent survival instinct from thousands of years ago unfortunately translates to anything negative we do today, we remember.

That comment we made that we thought was funny, but was actually inappropriate. That mistake in a meeting, or that time you looked dumb in front of your crush. As hard as it is, the key is to let all of that go, and just bring the valuable lessons forward without all the regret.

What did you learn? What in your past can you bring forward that will help you become the person you want to become?

The Same Lessons

What I’ve learned is the same lesson will be presented over and over to you, perhaps in slightly different forms, until you learn it. The failures will repeat until you learn and move past it.

For example, if I feel bad the day after I binge eat, what do I think will happen the next time I binge? Making the choice for a short term pleasure and a long term pain, is something that is a choice. But it’s a lesson that will keep being presented until learned.

Life is a journey, with a lot of suffering. I made tons of mistakes in just trying to see if I could do something, and paid heavy prices for it. I lost my father before I could learn much from him, and that was my fault, not his.

We face setbacks, like flooding, flooding again, and again. We face breakups with people we thought we’d spend the rest of our lives with. We live in a world that is challenged by poverty, slavery, disease, war, and more.

So there is individual suffering, community suffering, and systemic global suffering. It’s everywhere. You can’t escape it by hiding in a hole, and pretending it doesn’t exist.

Suffering Doesn’t Have to be for Nothing

If you are suffering through a workout in the effort to get stronger, it is worth it. If you are suffering at a job you hate to provide for your family, it is worth it. If you look at suffering as a challenge, even if it’s not of your own doing, then you can overcome that challenge.

Everyone faces challenges. Everyone suffers. But it’s how you look at it that matters. We live in a time of unprecedented growth, opportunity, and abundance, but only if you choose to look at it that way.

There are two sides to every story, and humans do awful things to each other, but you don’t have to give up. You don’t have to think the worst. You don’t have to be negative. It’s only suffering if you choose it to be.

In life there are many things beyond your control. There could be a worldwide pandemic, causing your government to shut down some of your freedoms, and causing your business to suffer. There could be an accident, a mistake, or an illness that impacts you. There are many many things that can happen and cause you to fail.

Fail at What You Love

One of the surprising things in life is not only can you fail at the things you love to do, you can fail the things you don’t love to do.

Let’s say you make a decision to pursue a career. This career will bring you all the things you think will make you happy: Money, status, bragging rights, whatever it is.

However, once you go down this path and are living the daily grind, you discover you don’t love it. In fact, over time, you learn to despise what you thought would bring you joy. Then one day there is a restructuring in your company, and you’re out.

You lose your job. The job you hated. You have failed at something you didn’t love.  This can happen to the best of us at any time.

So why not chose to spend your time doing something you do love instead?

Now the one caveat that must be made is most things over time become a job. You start off loving it, then you realize over time you have to do this same thing for hours and hours a day, for years and years. That’s OK. Because the real secret is not doing what you love, it’s loving what you do.

You can chose to love what you do, whatever that might be.

Fishing, working, selling, teaching, accounting, whatever it is. There is tremendous value in all of it.

You have the freedom to choose your perspective on what you do, and how you spend your time.  You can choose what to fail at.

While you might have thought you were going to change the world, simply changing your mind might be enough.

The bottom line is to take more risks, try more things, and fail more often because you can fail at what you don’t love, so you might as well try something you do.