You’ve failed, and you know it

Everybody loves talking about how they failed with their business and how they turned it into a success. Everybody loves talking about the seductive narrative of failure as a sort of a rite that you need to pass through to achieve a famous life.

But very few people talk about failure while they’re experiencing it.

People are interested in failure only if they can be successful as a result of it.

We’re so attached to the outcome that we can’t see the real value of failing.

David Lynch, the filmmaker, said once that when you fail and you don’t have a place to go, you can only go up. He added, “It’s total freedom, and it’s beautiful”.

Failure sets you free to go for the next thing only if you believe that you weren’t the cause of the failure, maybe what you did caused it, but not who you are. Failure sets you free if you came out of it guilt-free.

You did some good and some bad, made some good decisions and some bad decisions. You learned from it, and you understood that no matter how much you try, things can go wrong.

Pema Chödrön, a Buddhist teacher. says that failures are mistakes, the portal to creativity, to learning something new, not a step to success.

If you see failure as a way to be successful you will kill the embedded gifted of failure and the freedom that it brings, the lessons that you’ll learn, and the possibility of going on to the next stage, whatever that is.

#decisions #mistakes