I've been thinking a lot today about failure and how much power we sometimes let it have in determining our lives. I always liked that Michael Jordan quote about being able to accept failure but not being able to accept not trying and the more I thought about it the more I realized that basketball was a perfect example of it in my life as well. A star perimeter player in the NBA will hit around 50% of his shots that means he will fail half of the time he tries to make a shot. You might say well those are small failures and you would be correct but all of those small failures add up to great success. Even though a basketball player spends hours of his life practicing shooting he knows that even though he will miss shots he must keep shooting because of the confidence he has developed over the years.
I look at my own experiences with basketball and see plenty of defeats and failures to execute but it never erased my love of the game for they were all only temporary set backs. I could have stopped playing at the age of six when my shots weren't falling the way I wanted them, I could have stopped playing when I was cut from teams, I could have stopped trying to dunk (haha I'm still working on this)but none of this ever made me quit or make me any less passionate.
We only seem to remember our major letdowns and forget all the little battles we lost at first like learning to tie our shoes or ride a bike because those have become habits that are ingrained in our minds. I think the key is to try and never let one failure effect you more than another no matter how much you worked towards that goal. Obviously some will push us to our psychological breaking point and that's fine you're going to get knocked down sometimes but are you going to let one thing keep beating you down repeatedly?
That's one of the great things about being human, our ability to learn and overcome what we once thought were our limits. How many times did people fail before the 4 minute mile 'barrier' was broken? Well, every documented runner up to that point. Failure is not meant to be a deterrent but rather a learning experience, something that you analyze and try to figure out with the same vigor as your first attempt. You're always going to make mistakes there just isn't any point in letting it depress you.
So take this to heart when you're trying to accomplish your current goals or goals that are still on the horizon: Every success is made up of smaller failures. Maybe you're are trying to lose weight and it isn't working as well as you had planned. Does that mean you should just stop and revert back to your old unhealthy lifestyle? No, it only means that you must adapt to a new exercise and/or diet plan to get six pack abs. To get to where you want to go in life involves accepting that you will always experience more failure than you do moments of triumph.
