Failure2018

Im writing this as I wait for my glasses to be restored, which has taken way longer than it should have.  Anyway, I wanted to talk about failure a little bit today, but not necessarily in the negative way that it is often perceived as.  No matter how perfect you think you may be, you are not.  You have made mistakes or failed in the past.  And there's nothing wrong with that.  It's normal to make mistakes and it's definitely normal to fail.  We're all humans.  We all start at the same place, birth, and end at the same place, death.  We just take wildly different paths to get there.  However, I think there are some commonalities in all of life's journeys, and failure is one of them.

What I find funny about failure is that failing isn't actually failure unless you don't take anything away from that experience.  You need to embrace failure.  It's an essential part of life in order to grow, and can also serve as reminders that you need to grow and learn from your mistakes, or else your failures will pull you further and further down the rabbit hole of shit, which is obviously not the way you want to live life, in a rabbit hole full of shit.

So how can you turn your failures into a good thing?  Simple.  Learn from your failures.  Einstein's definition of insanity is to continue to do the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.  The results will continue to be failures unless you learn from your failures and adapt to what life throws at you.  Next time I get wasted I won't sit on my glasses, and next time you approach a beautiful girl you will notice the man walking with her and not take a fist to the face (unless that is your end goal, then I can't think of a better way to succeed)

A more personal and serious example was from back in the day when I was wrestling in highschool.  I made it to the finals of a tournament and I remember my dad telling me not to tie up with this guy or I would lose.  Well being the stupid indestructible 17 year old I was I decided to screw that and wrestle how I wanted to.  48 seconds later I got launched in the air in front of a good 2000 people and lost the match.  Did I quit wrestling after one of the most embarrassing days I remember?  Fuck no.  I was upset for a while, but in the end I embraced it, learned from it, and used it as fuel to become an even better wrestler and man by learning from my mistakes.  Needless to say, the next time I wrestled him at that tournament I didn't make the same mistake and won because I'm a badass.

Life is full of battles.  Just because you lose a battle doesn't mean you lose the war.  Keep learning and living and pushing forward no matter what life throws at you.