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Today's
Meditation:
Failure
is difficult. It's fairly easy for us to give
ourselves permission to fail, but what about our
employers? Our families? The people we supervise
at work? All of these people may have something to say
about our failures, especially if they're strongly affected
by them. It's great to say that we give ourselves
permission to fail, but there always may be fallout from our
failure.
Nonetheless,
it is quite liberating to be able to tell ourselves that
failure isn't the worst thing in the world, and that we can
go ahead and fail without our lives falling apart. The
expectation to succeed at every single thing we do is
unrealistic at best, and that expectation can hang over us
like a cloud, turning our days into living hells until we
actually have succeeded. Sometimes things don't work
out as we hope they will, and if we're still holding on to
the expectation of success, we can make ourselves miserable
when they don't.
All
of Edison's "failures" when he was trying to
create the light bulb, he said, were just so many things
that he learned didn't work, so he could strike them off his
list of possibilities. Many "failed"
experiments have turned into important discoveries in other
areas because the people doing the experiments kept their
eyes and minds open when the results didn't show exactly
what they expected.
You're
going to fail at something. So am I, and so are our
kids, our friends, our employers and employees. That's okay. Failure is the door to
wisdom, and failure often is the doorway to successes that
we couldn't even have imagined. The important thing is
how you treat yourself when you do fail-- if you give
yourself permission to fail, then you'll treat yourself with
the respect that you deserve for having tried something new
and different, no matter what the result.
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