I’ve been thinking a lot about the post I wrote last week and how failure has shaped my life over the past decade or so. Then my Hubby sent this article to me that talks about how failure can actually turn into success.
I’m not sure how I feel about the article. I mean, I get what the message is; that in order to succeed you have to allow failure into your life. That we can learn from our failures.
So what have I learned from my failures? Losing a job taught me that nothing in life is ever “stable.” Moving back to Detroit from Chicago after my Dad passed away taught me that guilt is a strong enough motivator. Infertility taught me that not everything that you give 100% into will result in success.
Not necessarily happy things, right? Truth is, failure has taught me to be more wary of people, of situations. The once confident woman that I was in my twenties, has morphed into a 40-year old woman with more self-esteem issues than a teenager.
What I need to do, as Hubby keeps telling me, is realize that I should let go of these failures and move on. And I need to realize that everything I do won’t necessarily fail; that even little things in life (and work) can be a success.
I need to believe in myself.
Failure does, indeed, instruct. It forces us to confront aspects of our lives in ways that success doesn’t. It also makes use stronger and more resilient in the process. ox, PJ
I feel that as “adults” we expect ourselves to be “more” because we just think that we should “know more” than when we were younger. It’s good in a way, but it can be a bad thing, too. When I moved to Finland from Indo, I had to start my life again from zero (learn a new language, adapt, etc.) and it ain’t easy, but only after that I learnt to laugh at my mistakes. Before then, I was always berating my own mistakes and I could scold myself for “being stupid” for weeks on end.
One other thing my move to Finland has taught me is to be kind to myself. Even so, when I found out we belonged to the IF group, that lesson wasn’t enough. I still need to learn to be kinder to myself, though I think it did help that moving to Finland had started me on that path already…
I know that some people may think that being kind to yourself may mean that you’re “giving excuses to yourself not to grow”, but I don’t agree with that. I think that if learning to be kind to myself would lead me to be kinder to others, then by all means I’ll learn that lesson, even if it takes a lifetime.