Counterintuitive

Sometimes I run across ideas that don't seem to make much sense on the surface, but they have deeper truths that reveal themselves later.  They seem to run counter to conventional wisdom and require me to give some thought to them, so I call them "counter-intuitive".  Today's counter-intuitive idea came from a Facebook post by the straightforward thinker and TV personality Mike Rowe (https://www.facebook.com/TheRealMikeRowe/posts/1916686088341525).  While the entire post is well worth a read, here is the part that jumped out to me:

"Failure was simply viewed as the most common symptom of trying. Consequently, the more I tried, the more I failed. The more I failed, the more I succeeded. The more I succeeded, the more confident I became."

For many of us, 'failure' is a bad thing.  It is associated with a sense of inadequacy, with shame or with uncomfortable feelings.  Because of this, our brains begin to associate 'failure' with 'bad' and we learn to avoid not only actual failure, but anything associated with failure.  You know, like, effort and trying.  After all, if I don't try, I can't fail. See?  This can snowball into other's perceiving us as 'lazy' and cowardly, but somehow, those things are more tolerable than feeling like a failure.

Wait.  There it is.  The subtle, but powerful, distinction.  *Being* a failure vs. failing.  As Mike Rowe indicated, when we fail.... when failure is an action, an outcome of trying something... something outside of us, it is possible to learn from it.  To grow from failure.  In this sense, when I try and fail, it is feedback.  It is experience that I can use to change my attitude, my behavior, my intention as I try again and move closer to success.  Far from being a bad thing, failure is an *essential* thing for me to experience.  When we internalize failure, we begin to see it not as something that often happens when we try something.  We think that failure is something that we *are*.  Can you understand the powerful difference between thinking, "I *am* a failure." vs. "I tried something and failed at it."?

I'm thankful for people like Mike Rowe, who can succinctly remind me to think differently about failure.  I'm thankful that I can think more deeply about what it means to fail and learn that failure, far from being a bad thing, is an essential thing to my success.

And now, may you find failure, and in failing, may you find that you are successful.  In feeling successful, my you try and fail and try some more and in the process discover that you are powerful beyond belief.

-Jeff