Fail Forward

Another year has come to an end and this time it also marks the end of a decade.  It’s kinda crazy to think that I have been around for the end of four decades.  But, that’s a story for another time.  This year I set a series of goals for myself that aren’t just for the coming year, but for the coming decade.  I think that allowing myself an opportunity to look further down the road than just one year will keep me motivated over the next 10 years.  I read a staggering statistic this morning that says, 80% of all New Year’s Resolutions fail.  That’s such a huge failure it makes me wonder why people bother to make resolutions at all.  I personally believe that a big part of resolution failures is the use of the word resolution, the number of resolutions people make, and the lack of a plan on what it will take to get there.  Then there’s the idea that there is not room for failure in the things you’ve set for yourself to achieve. 

If you paid attention above, I made a series of goals for the the next decade not resolutions.  Each of those goals require strong habits, a change in the way I do daily tasks, skills that I must develop, and a willingness to fail.  Most importantly within each of the goals I understand that I’m going to fail along the way, in fact one of my goals is to fail once a week.  Another is to write a blog post once a week, so here we are getting started on the first of 520 planned blog posts over the next 10 years (I hope you're ready for lot’s of failed attempts at writing).  I think it’s important to change the way we look at the New Year, the things we wish to achieve, and how we define success.

This blog post idea came to me after I found out that I had failed one of my 10 goals for the new decade on the first day of the decade.  Imagine that.  January 1, you’re pumped and ready to start the New Year and change the momentum of the life you just left behind in 2019 only to find out that one of your goals you set for yourself can’t be achieved (without breaking the law anyway).  I’m in the process of trying to start a clothing line, I have been doing lots of brainstorming and work on ideas for how I’ll use the clothing, inspire people to wear it and everything else to find out that someone else owns the rights to my idea.  Talk about a shocking blow, an epic failure to say the least.  Who would have thought that someone was already using the brand name that I wanted.  So, on the first day of 2020 I both failed a goal which was to build my clothing brand and succeeded on another which is to fail once a week.  Not a bad start to the new year.

As a society we treat the word failure like a six year old treats a cuss word.  We act ashamed of our failures, we don’t admit to them and over time we stop trying all together.  Then after time has passed we make excuses for why it didn’t work, why we aren’t where we want to be or who we planned to become.  Failure is going to happen, it’s a part of life.  Or at least it should be.  Imagine living a life without failure, what that says to me is that you’re living a life of not trying.  And a life without trying is not living.  If there’s one thing that I wish for everyone reading this post, it’s that I wish you all fail this year.  I hope you fall down, I hope you get rocked to your core, and then I hope you take that failure and push on, grow, learn, change and try again.  Our failures don’t make us less of a success (unless we refuse to learn from them and give up), they push us to become a greater success over time.  But, we must first accept failing as option and when that moment comes that we do not succeed, we must then forge a new path from the lessons learned.

All great people fail.  In fact great people, successful people, fail more than most.  Legend has it that Thomas Edison failed 999 times before creating the light bulb.  Imagine if he feared what people thought of his failures.  Imagine if he didn’t believe that each failure was a step along the journey to success.  He’s been known to say that he didn’t fail 1,000 times, but that it took 1,000 steps to create the light bulb.  Henry Ford failed and went broke five times before succeeding.  Abraham Lincoln entered a war as a captain and returned as a private, then failed as a businessman.  Winston Churchill repeated a grade during elementary school and twice failed the entrance exam to the Royal Military Academy.  Reggie Jackson and Jim Thome have the most strike outs in MLB history (2,597 and 2,548 respectively), but are both in the Hall of Fame.  Nine out of the ten most losing pitchers in MLB history (have lost 250 games or more) are also in the Hall of Fame.  

I could go on, but I’m sure at this point it’s become clear that failure is a great part of success.  But it’s not just that we must fail, but that we must continue to pursue our dreams despite our failures.  We must not become consumed by them, or fear the next failure that may come.  Instead we continue to put ourselves out there, we walk that fine line between knowing we will succeed and knowing we will fail and we live on the brink of our abilities all while knowing there is a chance we may fail, and that’s ok.  If we choose to live this way, on the brink of success and failure we may fall short at times, we may miss our mark, we may struggle and stumble along the way, but we may also make that next great breakthrough, we may find what we’re meant to do and the true extent of our abilities.  We may ourselves be great.

As we embark on this new decade I wish all of us great failures.  I hope we all fall down, miss swings, come up short, and lose.  I also hope we never give up, learn from our missteps, and become something special and memorable for decades to come.  Set big goals, be ambitious, don’t fear falling short or failing.  Fear not trying, fear not learning, fear not growing, fear staying safe and remaining the same.  As John C. Maxwell says, “Fail early, fail often, but always fail forward.”