Failure Is Your Fertilizer

You can’t grow without it

Failure

Failure is important in your life. We work hard and stress…stress eat…trying to avoid it.

You can’t.

I hate to ruin your opinion of yourself (and possibly your take-no-prisoners upbringing), but failure is going to happen. Yep, even to you.

Don’t believe me? Go to your stories page here right now and take a quick scan of how many of your stories have been curated. How many have singularly paid your rent in any given month.

If even one hasn’t, then listen up.

Ever get a traffic ticket? Ever late for something important? Ever go through a breakup/divorce? Ever have conflict with another human being?

If so, then listen up.

It’s not the end of the world.

Seriously. It’s not. Properly managed, it could be the beginning of your greatest success.

“You win, or you learn.” — Conor McGregor

If you write a piece, Grammarly it, put all the proper tags on it, and submit it to the right publication, only to be rejected by that publication, figure out why.

Maybe the article is just a few tweaks away from greatness as far as they are concerned. Maybe the topic is better suited in a different publication. Maybe it’s just a bad topic.

Your job when that happens is to figure out what the deal is and do it differently. You can’t do that if you just quit. Or bitch about it. Or keep doing it the exact same way and demanding a different result.

If you get into a fight with someone that severely strained your relationship with them, deconstruct it in private. Identify where the wheels fell off, accept responsibility for your part in it, and learn from the circumstance. Even if you can’t salvage that relationship, learning from how it blew up might save another.

Especially if it’s a marriage.

Just don’t always reflexively project 100% of the blame away from yourself, because that just isn’t honest. Maybe the other person is completely to blame, but deciding that reflexively without any examination of the fallout is bad policy.

Always looking for what you can learn from a bad thing happening is what helps you grow.

You get to harness the lessons of things breaking bad on you and ride them into a better understanding of life. Of yourself. Of others.

If you come out of failures, setbacks, speed bumps (speed tables if you live in Florida) — whatever you want to call them — knowing more than you did before they happened, then you’ve still won.

Never let a good bad thing go to waste. Even rotten food and animal excrement help things grow.

Why should your crap be any different?

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