Why There is No Such Thing as a Fail

You study really hard but you get a C on your test.

You train really hard but you still don’t come in first.

You prepare yourself for days to have a conversation with your crush and they walk away and laugh.

It’s easy to look at all of these things as fails right? You tried but then you didn’t achieve your goal (in either a mild or really embarrassing way) and it’s a major fail.

I’d like to erase the word failure from your vocabulary because life isn’t always about the achievement – it’s mostly about the attempt. When you attempt something you plan, you scheme, you train, you study, you try, you stretch, you challenge yourself, you take giant leaps of faith and sometimes, yes sometimes, you don’t accomplish what you set out to do. But my have you learned a lot along the way!

Rather than walking away in disgust and thinking that you failed or, even worse, that you’re a failure, it’s really better to just look at it as another one of life’s experiences. By trying and not succeeding, you learn something about yourself. You regroup. You reassess. You may even find that your goal wasn’t the right one and that when you change directions, everything comes easier. I’ve had plenty experiences in my life, from relationships gone bad to jobs that weren’t a good fit, that I could easily look at as failures. Instead, I realize that without these “fails” I wouldn’t be who I am today and I might have actually missed out on who I am supposed to become if it had not been for those “fails.” You have similar experiences in your past right? Think back to things you tried that didn’t work out. Did they change or redirect you in some way? Did you learn something from them? See! It’s not a failure – it’s just a different experience!

So the next time you try to achieve something and it doesn’t happen please promise me that you’ll try to change the way you think about what happened and not immediately jump to the word failure. In fact, I’d really like you to just erase the word failure from your dictionary ok? Ok.