The victory of failure

In life, some people fail. It’s a fact that it happens… yet in their failure is victory. It means they didn’t leave things to chance, they didn’t wonder, they went for it and in life, many of the biggest victors have had to swallow the bitter pill that is failure.

A while back I read a blog post that got me to thinking about failure and how we fear it. In essence though, the worst failure anyone can ever have is to never try. This isn’t some new found knowledge, it’s stuff we know yet once in a while we need a reminder that it’s not only OK to fail, it’s actually a great thing because you realize that many failures are not as bad as you worried about.

As humans, we do a marvelous job at imagining the worst and making things out to be endlessly more tragic than they are. Take for instance scary movies… the ones that truly scare me are the ones that don’t fill out the blanks and don’t show me the monster, instead leaving it to my own devices to imagine the worst. Failure is the same. Instead of being a five-headed leviathan, it is just a series of events, they are just things that happen and the fear of failure is often paralyzing enough to not even try.

As a surfer, I’ve learned many lessons in life and one of them is that if you don’t try, you’ll never progress. If I’d never tried an Air Roll Spin or a backflip for fear of failure, I never would have landed one, or dozens as I have. If I didn’t take off on a shady ledge, I wouldn’t have gotten some of the better barrels in my life, and just because I tried and gave myself the chance. Sure, sometimes you get a closeout and you also tag the reef, the thing is that the reward is definitely worth the risk.

The other thing that people fear about failure is public opinion and bully tactics. If you fail, people will make fun of you… I can understand fearing this because no one wants to be the fool… still, if you never try, if you never give yourself the chance to fail, you are also never giving yourself the chance to succeed and prove those people wrong. 

You have to realize, oftentimes, life rewards those who fail and persevere and it leaves alone all those who wonder. So here’s to the fire of failure to come upon us, forge our steel and let us carve our success.

Peace, love and maki rolls