Life’s Lessons Come Through Failures -Daily Meditation 10.18

Today’s quotation:

Life’s lessons come through failures, probably more than successes.  Through our failures, we learn humility.  We know to look to others for help and guidance.  We know how to let others fail, too.  We fail because we are human.  When we no longer fear failure, we can attempt more incredible feats.  We dare to learn more, and life is fuller for it–not just our own lives but the lives that we touch. -unattributed

Today’s Meditation:

I have a lot of failures to look back on in my life.  Relationships, plans, efforts, work–there’s a whole array of things that have gone wrong when I’ve tried to do things I couldn’t do.  But there’s also been a tremendous amount of learning that has taken place as a result of those failures, so I have no regret for them at all.  I know I have tried my best–often with limited knowledge and experience–so a failure isn’t a waste of my time or effort.

I don’t fear failure anymore.  I do my best to avoid it when I can, but I know that sometime in the future, I will fail again.  And again.  And that’s okay, as long as I put my best effort into what I do and do my best to make things work out.  One of the cool things I’ve learned is that very often, what looks like failure is a huge success–just because something doesn’t turn out the way that I hope it will doesn’t mean that something very positive doesn’t come out of it.

Allowing ourselves and others to fail is perhaps one of the most critical abilities that we have in our lives.  It frees us from the unrealistic expectations of perfectionism and keeps us from judging harshly when something doesn’t turn out as we hope it will.  Some of my best students have developed after failing a paper or a test. Suddenly, they realize that they need to study or spend more time on their papers if they want to succeed in a particular class by learning the material they’re expected to learn.  The failure is a catalyst to much better things, which is a very positive part of their educational experiences.

We can’t avoid failure, so it would be a good idea to allow it in our lives, accept it for what it is, and learn what we can from it instead of fighting it so vigorously.  Yes, we should do our best to avoid it when planning something. Still, if we keep in mind that failures will happen, we can accept them gracefully and use them to help us better our lives, careers, relationships, and anything else that’s important to us.

Questions to consider:

Why do so many people seem to have problems accepting failure?

How many people have you known who never fail at anything?

Is the main problem with failure the failure itself or how others react to it?  Or how we perceive others reacting to it?

For further thought:

Those who hope to avoid all failure and misfortune are trying to live in a fairyland; wise people realistically accept failures as a part of life and build philosophies to meet them and make the best of them. -Wilferd A. Peterson

If you missed our last Daily Meditation, it is here.