Failure

Failure is a matter of perspective. The best attitude to have about it is that it's part of the equation for success. Babe Ruth is called the King of Swat because of all the home runs he hit. But he was also called the Strike Out King because he had to swing a lot to hit all those home runs. So, people who take a lot of chances are bound to have a lot of failures, and not everyone will succeed.

So what? Look at failure as part of the learning process. People who have never failed have never pushed themselves. One could consider people who have never failed, cowards.

The worst part of failure is not the fact that you didn't cut it. It's what others think. It's telling your family that you're fired. It's never passing the law exam after all those years in school--not to mention money. Not being able to sell your book after devoting two years of your life to writing it. One could tell themselves that it just wasn't in the cards. It wasn't meant to be. But it's the look on your parents', your spouse, your friends, faces that hurts. It's not the failure itself; it's the opinion of others.

Regardless, one has to go on. Swing that bat, again. Thomas Edison experimented with 10,000 materials before he found the exact filament for his light bulb. Look at the video of Michael Jackson. He enumerates his failures and he concludes, "That's why I succeed." Take a chance.

Did you know that there's a Failure Club. It's a show on yahoo. The idea came from two girls. In Dec 2003, she told about how she had performed on stage in a holiday choir, something she had wanted to do her whole life, as the result of a dare with her sister on who could ‘fail’ first. A couple of producers were captivated by the idea of a support structure that used positive peer pressure and friendly competition to overcome the fear of failure, and they quickly gathered 9 friends for the inaugural Failure Club in 2004. It has been going on ever since.

About ten people pick an impossible goal and work at it for a year. Most fail. What of it? They failed because they had the courage to push themselves beyond their comfort zones. They tried and that was the start of an adventure. That's the way to look at failure.