Failure

 

Failure is not what you think it is. Most people picture the dramatic version, like the business collapsing or the test you flunked. But failure usually happens in smaller and quieter ways, like the risk you convince yourself you will take tomorrow.

We are taught to fear failure like that’s it. The end of the road, time to switch lanes. It is not. It’s like a toll booth. You pay your dues on the way to your eventual success; after all, every trophy you admire has a long receipt of failures stapled to it. Nobody likes to talk about that part because failure feels embarrassing, like proof that you were not good enough. But no. Failure is proof that you tried something you could actually lose.

The weird part is that we forgive failure when it other people experience it. Actually we don’t even forgive, we celebrate it. We celebrate comeback stories. We celebrate the athlete who chokes on the final shot one season and wins the trophy the n
ext. We watch interviews where artists laugh about the twenty terrible songs they wrote before the one hit. We find their failures charming. When it is our own, we treat it like a permanent stain.

Here is the part nobody says out loud: failure is not permanent. Forget the inspirational posters for a second. Think about it practically. If you burn a meal, you can cook again tomorrow. If you bomb a presentation, there will be another one. If you waste a year chasing the wrong project, it's never too late to start a new one. Failure feels final because it bruises the ego. But the bruise fades.

So maybe failure is not a red light. Maybe it is more like a detour sign. Annoying, yes. Unexpected, sure. But there's still a way forward.

If you wait for a path with no chance of failure, you will never take a step. And that is the worst kind of failure of all. The invisible one. The one where nothing even happened.

So fail. Fail loudly, fail clumsily, fail in ways you will laugh about later. Because failure is not the opposite of success. It is the raw material of it.