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Success doesn’t teach anything. Failure does…
But only if learning is welcome. Failure is deemed both wrong and unnecessary by today’s man.
Let’s look first what is the meaning of success and what is the meaning of failure, so we have the same picture of what we are looking at.
Let’s say that you set up a dart board and have a couple of darts.
You’ll throw darts…
Hitting the bull’s eye is the ultimate success, but even hitting the board itself, in the beginning, will be success… given that you start not being good at directing the dart with your arm.
As I am writing this, I am thinking of a one-time student who never even managed to hit the proverbial dart board: he never even hung in long enough to achieve that level of success.
When anything other than a perfect bull’s eye is considered failure… you probably never get to the bull’s eye…
So you throw the dart. You try throwing with different arm movements… But ultimately you miss the board. The dart goes to the left, or to the right, but not at the board.
Depending on your attitude regarding success and failure, you either adjust your aim, or not.
And yes, success and failure are attitudes. Not right, not wrong, not truth… ATTITUDES.
An aside: of course if you throw knives to your lover…
Watch this clip from The Girl on the Bridge, one of my all time favorite movies
Today’s human has the McDonald’s attitude
I should throw the dart and it should hit the bull’s eye, or I won’t do it again. Or maybe: I’ll try anything once, twice if I like it, three times to make sure. But not more.
So today’s human never succeeds…
Today’s human never experiences the feeling of mastery approaching. the getting better. the power of being the master of your ship.
Today’s human stops way way way before…
But when I look, it is because for today’s human ‘Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.‘
And ladies and gentlemen, this is why today’s human is not happy. Not joyful. Not fulfilled.
People are not interested in getting better… they want to get good… instantly. In anything.
Thin, rich, happy, famous… whatever the good means for the individual.
I had two weeping-for-joy moments this morning from two of my clients.
Both got the significance of process. The significance of building. The building on yesterday’s incremental growth, incremental improvement, yesterday’s insight.
The using yesterday’s failure to get better.
The beauty of challenges is that you have a chance to get better, and call your failures learning tools.
Given that we are embarking on the Drink Your Food challenge today, the handful of brave people who applied will have a chance to practice getting better.
You would think that it’s easy to chew your food until it is liquid… and you would be inaccurate…
It is actually hard.
I give you this: some food items: it is easier. But the mushier the food, the harder it is to sustain the chewing.
So the past two days I have only had failures… and my stomach is telling me: not this way.
So I can see that the old habits: it’s good enough, die hard.
The mouth may say: ‘it’s done‘ way way way before it’s liquid… I find myself swallowing. And my stomach behaves as if I had dropped a boulder in it.
So that was a failure… I need to learn to control more consciously what my mouth does… don’t we all? lol
There is a book I really loved, ‘Chop Wood Carry Water’ all formats or just the PDF.
It spoke to me more than many other books… I wanted that for myself…
So as I am practicing chewing my food to the degree that it is drinking… I think of that book… a lot. And it helps. It helps appreciating the failures as my only teachers… Failures that show me which direction to move so I can fail less, or succeed more.
And lastly: the sin the Bible talks about is a mis-translation.
The Hebrew word simply mean ‘miss’… Miss the target. By a lot, by a little. All those misses are there to teach you.
But, of course, the evil church with its systemic judgment condemns every miss… And instead of encouraging the believer to self-correct, they make them say some prayers… that will do nothing.
You don’t need absolution. You need practice. Self-correcting. Using errors, mistakes, failures to show you the way.
Don’t make the f…ing right wing right… that you are an untrainable rigid entity. Unable to think for yourself. Better yourself. Choose for yourself.
Anyway… instead of forcing you to listen to my rant… why don’t you sign up to the challenge… if you are willing to be the boss in your life for five days… If you are willing to learn from your failures…
Sign up to the Drink your Food Challenge
