“You cannot measure a man by his failures. You must know what use he makes of them. What did they mean to him. What did he get out of them.”–Orison Swett Marden
Failure gets a bum rap. Failure carries a negative connotation with most people. In reality, though, we will ALL fail from time to time. If you haven’t failed, you haven’t tried anything substantial.
What do you make of failure? “Failure is always an option” (Cael Sonnen), but it is what you choose to do with failure that is most important.
We often say that no one sets out to fail, and, in the broadest sense, no one really does, but…. Why not? Why are we afraid to fail? Should we be afraid to fail? Personally, think we should be in greater fear of not failing.
Wrestling season is underway. My son has moved up to the “Elite” level of his local club team. Until this year, he had practices twice a week, and the purpose was to emphasize the fundamentals and to develop a love of the sport. This season, he joins the boys and girls who have been wrestling for a while and who have been competing at a much higher level. He won’t admit it, but he is a bit intimidated. Thankfully, he has phenomenal coaching and loves the sport. Nonetheless, I sense his trepidation.
This will probably not be his best season of club wrestling—though, he always surprises me. He is a tenacious kid. He shows very little emotion, except when he gets frustrated. So, I tell him every practice to “go into the room and fail”.
I know I am a great parent, right?
Hear me out. I want my son to fail at this level (at least in practice). Why? Because, if he is failing he is giving 100%. If he fails, it means he has challenged himself. If he fails, now, in practice, he will have the confidence to try things when it really counts. If he fails, now, he is learning what doesn’t work. He is discovering his weaknesses and working on those. If he only works to his strengths, eventually, the kid who is working on resolving his weaknesses will surpass him. I ultimately want him to succeed when it matters—and that isn’t necessarily on the wrestling mat.
We all need to take this approach. As the saying goes: “If you fall on your face, at least you are moving forward.”
Life is not about taking the easy path. Life—a life that is truly lived—is about challenge and overcoming. Life is growth! Be your best today; be better tomorrow REQUIRES that you extend your limits.
We cannot walk or run without going outside of our base of support. Locomotion is essentially a cycle of falling and catching one’s self. Biomechanically, when we walk we lean forward until our center of mass falls outside of our base of support—i.e., we lose our balance and fall forward. We catch our balance with the leading foot, and repeat. This is progress. This moves one forward.
So, why live life on stable footing. As long as we stay within our comfort zone (i.e., our base of support), we don’t move. If we don’t move, we go nowhere!
Switching sports: Michael Jordan is said to have always worked to his weaknesses in practice. I wonder where that got him?
Thomas Edison—not a wrestler, as far as I know—famously “failed” in roughly 10,000 attempts to invent the light bulb. Do we call him a “failure”? We call him a genius!
If you never fail at anything, you are living a rather ordinary life. If you dare to fail on a regular basis, I would call that (extra)ordinary. Keep failing. Great things are sure to come.
Carpe momento!!
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”—Thomas Edison