Fortunate Failure

Obviously it sucks to fail. But instead of crying in the fetal position for five hours about it, gather up the strength and determination to try it again, only ten times better than you did before. Okay, so you don't want to risk the embarrassment of failing again, but what if you pass up an opportunity of success? To me, that's worse than the risk of failing twice. You only fail if you give up trying.

Failure.

What an awful, cringe-worthy, terrible word. Whether it is a big, fat red “D” on your math test, a missed goal kick from only a few feet away, or not achieving that one thing you wanted more than anything in the world—you failed.

What should you do now? Burn your math test? Hide in shame from your teammates? Or call your parents and sob on the phone until you feel slightly better? I mean, you have no other choice, right?

Yeah, you feel pretty sucky and you know that your parents definitely like your sibling better after you bombed the test, and the coach regrets ever letting you join the team, and you definitely can’t do anything you want anymore because you’ll just fail again. But have you ever thought that maybe getting a bad grade or missing a goal wasn’t failure—but instead you fail by giving up on yourself afterwards?

By no means did I have this outlook on failure before. I was that pathetic girl who called her parents sobbing because the newspaper didn’t want to take my story. I felt as though my passion, talent, and motivation weren’t good enough, so I ultimately failed. I wanted to give up.

But then my dad told me something worthwhile: you only fail if you give up trying.

Huh.

Once I dramatically hung up the phone and dried the rest of my tears away, I started thinking. Maybe he’s right: sure, the newspaper didn’t want to publish my work, but that doesn’t mean I’m a bad writer. So do I give up on something I love to do just because of one rejection? Hell no.

I make a blog. (And the first story is the rejected one from the newspaper. Oh, they’ll regret their rejection once I become a famous blogger. Muahaha). Creating this blog gave me a new strength and happiness that I thought could only be achieved if I was published in the newspaper. But I was wrong—if I had given up after that, I would have never known how great it would feel to write for myself in this blog.

So while you’re sitting alone feeling sorry for yourself after your infamous D on your math test (for the record, it was a D+…that counts for something, right?),  or about how you missed the biggest goal of the game, or about the story you passionately wrote that didn’t make it into the paper, think about what you just experienced.  

You were momentarily knocked down, but that doesn’t mean you have to stay down.  You have the strength to keep going, so rub the dirt off, and get back up. If you don’t taste failure, you’ll never be able to savor success. So don’t give up, or else you really did fail.

I mean, take it from Chumbawumba: you get knocked down, but you get up again. And you’ve got to listen to a band with a name like that.