by Sage Crystal
To face fruitless effort often times takes heroic courage to pick up the broken pieces of life, to look bravely towards the future, and proceed undaunted on our way. But what to our eyes may seem hopeless, failure is often but the dawning of a greater success.
Shame has been brought upon many of us so early in life that failure is a negative thing. However, failure is one of the most important elements of our lives. Many of our failures sweep us to greater heights of success than we ever hoped for in our wildest dreams. Life is a successive unfolding of successes from failures. A lack of success teaches us what works and allows us to focus on other strategies that may prove more successful. Yet we demonize failure and view it as a terrible part of life—we even allow it to contribute to our self-perception and self-esteem, two places where failure does not belong. We must not and should not define ourselves by something that we tried and didn’t succeed at, especially if we learned from the failure.
“Once I had a dream that I had a bee-hive inside my heart
and the busy bees where making golden, sweet honey
and white honey combs from my old failures.”
~Sage Crystal
Failure is one of God’s greatest educators. I am grateful for the failures in my life. For my failures have shown me very important aspects of myself and a revelation of a new way…a path, previously, unbeknownst to me. My mind is now open to the probability of failure in all that I do, for two reasons: firstly, to see if I can actually avoid the failure, and, secondly, to learn how to handle failure if it does come to pass. It is only when I enter into situations with a true respect for the possibility of failure that I can put my all into them without having the illusion that my all is not necessary.
Our highest hopes are often destroyed to prepare us for better things. I know this to be true in my own life. The failure of the caterpillar is the birth of the butterfly; the passing of the bud is the becoming of the rose; the death or destruction of the seed is the prelude to its resurgence as wheat. It is in the darkest hours, those preceding the dawn, that plants grown best, that they most increase in size. Open your eyes to nature’s gentle showing to us that this is when we grow best—the darkness of failure that evolves into the sunlight of success.
Lucy: “You learn more when you lose.”
Charlie Brown: “Well then, I must be
the smartest person in the world.”
So many of what we call failures have more to do with other people than they do to ourselves. Did we really fail when we lost a tennis match because our opponent played better? Do we fail in sales because that person decided not to buy my product? Other people make decisions in life and their decisions usually have nothing to do with us. Someone may decide not to buy that car from us, not because we failed at selling it to them, but because their financial situation does not allow them to afford it right now. I may have lost that tennis match not because I failed to defeat my opponent, but because my opponent may have been better than me, or because my opponent simply had an awesome match.
The most tragic part of failure that I’ve witness as a life coach is when people allow the fear of failure to prevent them from doing something meaningful and important. There are many students who fail to do the work because of their fear of doing it poorly and thus fail. These are students who are fully capable of doing the work, at least, at a “C” level but end up failing, not because of their efforts but because they don’t even allow themselves to try to do the work.
Failure is a reality; we all fail at times and it’s painful when we do.
But it’s better to fail when striving for something wonderful, challenging,
adventurous and uncertain than to say, “ I don’t want to try, because I may
not succeed completely. “
~Jimmy Carter
Failure has become taboo—a dirty word. In fact, it is one of the absolutes in life if we are to ever live life fully, meet our potential, and learn the lessons that we are supposed to learn in life. This, however, does not pertain to the non-enthusiasts who fail because they simply don’t care about what they are doing, but when redefining failure as a positive in our life, we can learn from it and allow it to help us to grow and become better people because of our failures than we would have been had we succeeded.
