Failure is Always an Option

We put so much emphasis on failing.  Lately, I keep seeing articles about revisiting our thoughts on failure.  Basically, failure is all the rage.  And I love it. In a nutshell the articles point out that if you never fail it’s possible you aren’t trying.  Arguably not to fail is to fail.   We tend to put so much emphasis on success, a term we struggle to define.  What makes a person successful—happiness, money, free time, a family, a home, the right outfit?  There is no standardized definition of success.  And, perhaps contrary to popular belief, failure is always an option.

Thanks to Merriam Webster for the following:

Success: 1) the act of getting or achieving, wealth, respect or fame. 2) the correct or desired result of an attempt.

Failure: 1) omission of occurrence or performance. 2) a state of inability to perform a normal function. 3) lack of success.

I don’t want fame.  So, I guess in not achieving fame, I’m successful in my goal.  I don’t think wealth is a substantive sign of success.  It’s a superficial form.  Maybe it’s a way to tally and compare, but wealth is not guaranteed to bring you joy, or a life without pain, or to make you feel successful.  It doesn’t mean you will be a good person.  And who is to say what the correct or desired result of an attempt is?  When we first try something we might not even know the best or most successful outcome.  Sometimes an unexpected finding could bring us more success than the goal we were originally seeking.  But by the dictionary definition we’d be failures.

Failure, it seems to me based on the first the first definition, is ultimately: not trying. Omission of occurrence?  To not do anything is to fail.  If you try at least you succeeded at trying.  Some of my best stories come from moments of failure.   I’m trying to raise bees.  I fail often.  I tried to make a Brussel sprout Sheppard’s pie once.  It was a flop.  But the friends I served it to still joke about it.  If I’d made something good that night we’d never talk about it.

When we think about success and failure in the form of movement (as we often want to do), it can be really frustrating not to be able to do a certain move.  Trust me.  I know.  I’m working on pull ups, monkey bars, hand stands and a yoga move called the peacock.  If and when I conquer any of these I will be excited.  I will feel like I’ve succeeded.  But I don’t feel like a failure now because I can’t do them.  I have fun trying (except with pull-ups).  Sometimes playing with these moves is more fun than the exercises I can do.  I like the challenge (except with pull-ups).  The process feels good.  And I’m making changes in my body that I don’t even realize the benefits of (except maybe on pull-ups).

“Failing” to do an exercise or movement has often helped me to learn to do an exercise better that I thought I could do easily.  Our experiences aren’t isolated.  Failing at the task at hand doesn’t mean that we haven’t gained something along the way.

There are exercises I have tried that I couldn’t do right away.  They felt so hard.  And I’d realize that another exercise I thought was so easy should be incorporating those same muscles, but I hadn’t previously felt them activate.  Now I suddenly understood what it felt like to work a particular part.  I may not be ready for the tough move, but if I’d never tried it, I also couldn’t figure out what I needed to get there.  Through failure we learn.  The body learns.  And learning something always seems like it belongs in the success column.