Embracing Failure

Embracing Failure

It's easy to think about our dream future selves as failure-free. I'm sorry to burst your imaginary bubble. That's not going to happen. We will continue to fail as we grow. If we stay the same and try to avoid all new hard things, well, in a way that's failure too.

What if instead, we embraced our imperfect selves? What if we embraced our imperfections? Failure and success live in the same neighborhood.

The more we fail the more likely we'll succeed. Celebrate your failures, seek failures out. Each failure brings us closer to success.

I am a writer. At first I thought I'd figured it out, if I never finished a book, I could never be rejected. After dozens of partially finished books I decided I'd had enough and started a new book and finished it. Now I've finished over a dozen books and gotten hundreds of rejections.

Each rejection from an agent used to destroy me and I'd think, why even bother? What's the point? Who am I to think I can write a book? I'll never make it. That thinking made it hard to write the next day, sometimes the next week. I had to change my thinking. I am a writer, so that's what I do regardless of what the world around me says or feels about it.

I still get rejections, lots of them, but I always have a new project I'm working on. After about six months I revisit a novel I previously thought was done. And whoa! I've grown and I can see it still needs more work. I am glad that the stuff I was writing two decades ago didn't make the cut, because now I can go back and make it better.

Rejection is a part of life, no matter what you choose to do. But what you do with that rejection is up to you. Let me know what your favorite rejection was.