What I’ve Learned from Failing Over and Over

As a culture, we tend to think of failure as a bad outcome of some sort of risk. The reason may be that we take failure very personally — “I failed!” If we can take a step away from that personal attachment, one can start to see failure as simply the gap between what is possible and what is so. As to what is possible, we won’t know without a lot of failures. Failure is the only way to learn our real limitations; our limitations before failure are imagined.

The one who gets up is never the same as the one who fell. Something is changed by the act of getting up.

• “In most cases, our so-called limitations are nothing more than our own decision to limit ourselves.” – Daisaku Ikeda
• “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all … in which case, you fail by default.” — j.k. rowling
• “There is something good in all seeming failures. You are not to see that now. Time will reveal it. Be patient.” — Swami Sivananda

If you haven’t failed – you haven’t lived.

Originally written March 12, 2011

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