Again, we’ll refer back to Henry Ford, who said, “Failure is just an opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligibly.”
Now, I’m betting you’ve likely never used the word intelligibly in your life.
But you get the point.
It’s not how many times you fall, but how many times you get back up.
What if there was no failure?
One of my mentors says when you get out and do something in the world, when you run a little experiment in your life, you either get the results you wanted or the lessons you needed.
It’s okay to fail.
If you aren’t failing, you aren’t trying to do big enough things.
In coaching practice, we say to reach one of your big goals that it can be useful to make a list of 100 failures that you are willing to have. That way when you fail once or twice or three times, you know you are learning and making progress. By the time you reach the 100th failure, chances are that you will have made some pretty significant strides, learned an awful lot, been vulnerable, courageous, brave, and put yourself out there over and over again.
It’s about who you become on the way. You’re a different person by the end of the journey.
Imagine who you might become if you were willing to put yourself out there, fail, not make it mean anything about you or your chances for success in the future, learn, dust yourself off, and start over again, more “intelligibly” this time.