They failed at a version of life they never even started.  There are people who profess to know the answers or that they know what’s best in any circumstance.  These are the armchair quarterbacks, the backseat drivers, the “I would have done-ers”.  These are the people who speak as if they have experience doing what we want to do but they have no credible action.  We all know these people and, I’m confident enough to guess that at one point or another, these are the people we would have (or did) listen to.  We took their words to heart and stopped trusting ourselves enough to do what we knew we had to do.  The reality is we stopped ourselves for a person who has no real knowledge of what it is we’re trying to do or what we’re about. The people who seem to have this degree of knowledge are those who haven’t lived their own lives, specifically the life they want so how could they tell us how to live the life we want?

The other viewpoint in this is that we give up before we even start.  We allow ourselves to fail before we really even try.  This is most usually from lack of confidence, perhaps stemming from the people we talked about above.  Regardless of the origin in lacking the trust we need for ourselves, we can easily fall into the habit of convincing ourselves that something is too hard, too far out of reach, or simply not for us before we even make an attempt at it.  We will never know what we can do unless we go for it.  We will never see the fruit of our efforts if we don’t put our effort toward what we really want.  I don’t use the word failure often because I truly don’t believe in failure—even though I’m acquainted with the feeling—but in this case, I believe that the only true failure is letting a dream die before we even try.  We are so gifted, so talented, so capable yet we tell ourselves otherwise.  We convince ourselves other dreams are more important than our own until that dream starts to fade away.

Do not be a victim of not starting.  Make the choice here and now that no matter what happens, the reason something doesn’t happen will NOT be because we didn’t put in the effort.  Plans may change, we may have to change course so things may not look how we think they will—that doesn’t mean it isn’t working.  It doesn’t mean we are failing.  Creation is a tricky process and shifting the trajectory of our lives from one track to another is a difficult process, I don’t pretend it isn’t.  But if we manage to move ourselves bit by bit every day, we can always say that we did something to bring us closer to what we wanted.  Coming close isn’t a failure.  Sometimes close is there to teach us that we really wanted something else.  But if we lose faith in who we are and choose to sit back taking direction from those armchair quarterbacks, that is a failure on us.  I think the saying goes something like, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”  Even if it’s scary and we’re not sure if we can do it, if we take that chance, we know that we made the effort.