“Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly,” JFK.  This is the next level to what we were talking about yesterday. This is more than discomfort, this is a willingness to outright fall on our faces and what that failure can do for us.  I know the times I failed, I took it as permanent.  I believed that the failure was a resounding no from the universe and that I wasn’t meant to go that path.  I often wonder, knowing what I do now, that if I had continued to pursue any of those paths what would have happened.  I would be an entirely different person.  If I had gone past the discomfort of that initial failure, I may have become an expert in any one of a million things that fascinated me but I lost the courage to go after because I was once told no, or once made a mistake.  I feel that is also part of the reason why I stuck with the wrong things for so long.  I wanted to prove that those choices weren’t a mistake, that they could turn into gold.  I digress a bit.  Failure isn’t a life sentence and it doesn’t mean it’s over for good.  Sometimes we have to learn to redirect and we have to understand that when we take risks and push ourselves to the limits of our comfort, we find new ways to get what we want.

Failure is a milestone toward learning how to create what we want.  It shows us what doesn’t work on that path and guides us toward what does.  It also shows us that we need to be clear and direct on what we are doing.  For example, I spoke about clarity the other week (not a new topic) in regards to focus and how we achieve what we are looking to.  We have to decide to commit to one thing and see it through and that means accepting any failure that comes with it.  We don’t always get it right on the first try, we aren’t experts the first time we walk on the field.  And when we focus, we need to learn all the points that fail in order to develop the strongest result in the end.  We need failure to learn the weak points so we can make them better.  And the bigger we go, the bigger the potential for failure—and the bigger the failure may be.  But as we develop our skin and learn about ourselves and about the task we are trying to accomplish, those failures become easier to handle, the things we thought were life ending become a stepping stone.  Failure puts things in perspective.

Without failure we lose the ability to adapt and we close our minds to what we may need to know in order to achieve the highest level of success.  Failure doesn’t feel good for many reasons—sometimes a lot is hinging on the success of an idea and when we don’t get the results we are looking for it can feel overwhelming, like we will drown if we don’t do it right the first time out.  But as we develop and grow our capacity and tolerance for failure increases and our learning curve goes down, meaning it takes less and less failure to get the results we need.  If we want big, we have to do big.  We have to trust that it’s all part of the plan, that we will find our way.  Failure isn’t some scarlet letter we have to carry around and it isn’t a stopping point—unless we let it be.  Take failure as an opportunity to redirect and refine ourselves and the goal and to hone our skills.  Don’t let failure become regret.  Don’t let temporary discomfort become a permanent block to permanent joy.  We are meant to be adaptable and change and sometimes we have to fail in order to get to the right spot.  It’s no reflection on who we are, it’s a guidepost to who and what we want to become.  Stay focused on closing the gap and we can’t go wrong.