You say “Failure” as if it’s a bad thing.

Every time I tell someone I am renaming my blog to “Financial Failure to Money Maven” they make a sour face and say… (and they scrunch up the word)

“Failure?”

“Were you really a financial failure?”

Uh, well… yeah, I have had a house foreclosed on, I have had a car repossessed, if I didn’t hit the lottery with the most patient landlady ever I would have been homeless too.

But failure isn’t exclusively bad, in my opinion it’s somewhat essential. You need to fail, to lose, if you never fail you’ve never tried… expect failure, don’t accept failure, overcome it. I feel like I’m just naming off quotes…. from posters…

with a kitten…

hanging from a telephone line.

I’m not telling you to be reckless or a defeatist,  small failures are good, large failures can be catastrophic, and avoiding the failures that happen due to poor planning is prefered. Failures are feedback. Failures show you how not to do …it.. whatever “it” is. BUT… even if you have bombed in life, in whatever way you bombed- it’s not the end of the world, either.

About two years years ago… if I was to speak on failure, it would have been a completely different narrative. I had reached a point where everything in my life was soggy, I was soggy, my marriage was soggy, my relationship with my kids was soggy, and I just felt stagnant and lame.

Sedentary.

I was afraid of failing (like most of us) until I was fortunate enough to be given an opportunity to explore crossfit. I was given a free membership (sponsored “athlete”), and with that gift I felt an obligation not to squander it.

So I went to the gym. a lot.

When I first started, I thought I was going to die, and I couldn’t do any of the things. In the workouts, they would say to do pull ups, and I couldn’t do a pull up. Do a handstand, I couldn’t do that, couldn’t do the box jumps, or the olympic lifts. So I had to change my mentality on failure, I had to adjust my paradigm. I had to embrace my failures as attempts at success.

I realized that in order to succeed at something, you HAVE TO TRY, like, that is the only real absolute requirement. And the first time you try, you’re going to fail, and if you don’t fail, you’re not pushing yourself enough or your goal is too low.

“In order to succeed at something, you HAVE TO TRY,

like, that is the only real absolute requirement”

This completely changed the way I perceive EVERYTHING. All the things.

This one little gym, this one crazy fitness trend, changed my life completely because I learned that failure is good.

That is where growth happens.

Growth happens within failure, you try something and it fails, so you re-assess the situation and you try it again…. and if it still fails you make any lingering, necessary changes and you see what worked and what didn’t work, and you learn and you grow, and you try really fucking hard. And this is the definition of self improvement! How do you improve without failing?

You don’t.

I mean, not really.

You won’t change and improve, if you only do things you know you can win. Well, actually, you will change- we are ever changing, whether we like it or not, but I doubt it will be the changes you are looking for. So, if you are afraid of failure… Afraid of trying, essentially, your progress will be limited. I’m not going to say you will or won’t make some progress, it could go either way. And if that’s good enough for you, right on.

But it is not enough for me.

I want progress, I want to learn and grow. I want to be the best version of me I can become, and I’m gonna fucking fail. probably a lot. I already have on an epic scale a couple times, (if you include marriages)… but fuck man, I’m learning. I am growing. I am improving.