Naturally, I am a perfectionist. I hate sucking. I hate failing. I hate it when I am not the one breaking the curve or setting the bar high. I thrive on my will to win and succeed and to get better and better and better.
Failure is like a swift kick to the…well, insert your own word there. It knocks the wind out of you. It makes you pull off the road for a few. You have to make your way to the bench. It makes you stop.
Failure can make you do more than stop though…it can lead to quitting, retirement, resigning, giving up. I have been thinking recently about how failure can be a great teacher. There are things we learn when we step out and risk and try something new that we never could have learned any other way. I often don’t risk in an area because I couldn’t stomach failure. I think failure has a very real potential to define you, but I also think a great deal of how we get defined or remembered or what our legacy looks like – I think we get to make that choice; it’s our responsibility to take or surrender.
I have included a couple of blogs below that were thought-provoking to me along this subject, from a couple of pastors whose words I read each week.
http://www.evotional.com/2006/12/godipodcom.html
http://swerve.lifechurch.tv/2009/03/10/failing-forward/
Mark Batterson – the blogger at evotional.com and pastor of National Community Church in D.C. – tells about the psychological reality (in his book “In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day”) that we regret in the short term our actions. These are things we shouldn’t have done – the “I was young and stupid” things. But he describes how as we get older, those regrets fade and the regrets of inaction become the strongest. These are things that we should have done, but didn’t. A risk in our career, a move to a new city, a chance that we were too afraid of failing in, a dream we couldn’t leave safety to pursue.
Failure can be our greatest teacher if we can get over the fear of failing. And as Batterson said, in the post on the Swerve blog, the antidote to the fear of failure is small failures – the kind that remind us that failure is not fatal nor final.
What do you think?
-Scott
