SMR Day Fourteen - Fail Trying
When I started this little mindset project, Covid was still a novelty, something people were discussing casually, wondering how it all might go. So I thought:
“Now might be a great time to do a 30-Day mindset reset to help us over this little speed bump. Hooray!"
That was more than three months ago and we're on Day 14.
Whatever.
I finished Bob Goff’s new book Dream Big this afternoon and two of my favorite words in the whole book are these:
FAIL TRYING.
The thing most of us don’t get about failure is that it’s a necessary part of any meaningful endeavor, and it’s usually survivable.
So here’s the secret: When you fail and keep going, it’s not a failure, it’s a lesson that helps you do it differently next time.
Does that seem basic? That’s because it is.
But when you fail to start because you're afraid to fail … that’s a different story.
Many of us have become so addicted to comfort and safety that we’ve forgotten anything worthwhile will demand risk and a willingness to fail.
If it’s big or important to you, why would it be easy?
Bob tells a story in Dream Big in which he and some friends were rescuing little girls from a brothel in India. To put a fine point on it, this was just one of many places where men can pay money to rape children.
Bob is a warrior for children. Has been for years.
But several things went terribly wrong and they wound up trapped in an SUV without the keys, surrounded by an angry mob, throwing rocks through the windows. He and his friends didn’t die, though they could have. Instead, they wound up in an Indian jail.
To me, the best part of that story is, Bob didn’t tie it up with a pretty Jesus bow.
He let it be the dangerous mess it was to show us exactly how failure will absolutely factor into our big ambitions.
I believe that’s because Bob knows like I do, that everything is always working out, even if the bow on top is hard to see or slow in coming.