Failure

When I was a child, failure was touted as something bad, something I should avoid as much as possible.

I learned at an early age that I could NEVER fail. If I failed anything, I was unlovable. So, of course the minute I got to the point where anything got difficult, where I would possibly fail, I quit. An example: I have an excellent ear for music. If I can sing something, I can play it either on the guitar or on the piano. But I remember as a child getting to the point when I HAD to learn to read music or be able to go no further. And what I did then was to give up music lessons,

One of the hardest things I have had to learn in my life is that failure doesn’t matter. I started realizing this in my thirties when, after my divorce, I got a computer and started playing around with it. There was no one to see me fail and no one to make judgements of me when I failed and so I started asking myself. “At what point did this go wrong?” and retracing my steps and slowly learning to be successful.

Once I watched a friend copy a program onto my computer. When I got the computer home, I decided to try this for myself. This was in the days of DOS, not the easy Windows point and click. The first time I did it, I got it wrong. I went away and started vacuuming the pool, and while I was doing that, suddenly, almost like the proverbial light bulb, I realized where I had gone wrong. And so I went back and did the procedure correctly.

The point of this story is that this was the first time I had allowed myself to fail and not blamed myself for it. And I learned that learning to deal with failure can very often be an early step in learning to succeed.