Everyone's been there.
Sometime's it's surreal, other times its expected. It's universal, it's really awful. We pour everything into something, and we want it more than anything else. But yet, there it is...failure. Uninspiring, difficult failure.
The really interesting thing that I've found about failure, is that it really and truly defines who we are as people. The way we deal with failure lends us knowledge into our own psyche, and it shows how we deal with stress, relationships, pain, and ironically enough, success. Some of us have natural tendencies to grit our teeth down and fight with greater inspiration to overcome our failures, others have an immediate desire to give up, but most fall somewhere in between. The really unfortunate thing that I have discovered about myself in regards to failure, is that I am very much the kind of person that wants to quit. My immediate reaction when I feel pain is to give up, go numb, and wait for it to go away.
For those who don't know me, I am a rock climber. Over the past year especially, climbing has taken me on a soul-searching journey, and I have found a lot of truths through my experiences. Climbing is how I found out that I give up when I encounter failure. Climbing has shown me that I'm mentally weak. However, climbing is also how I discovered that we are not slaves to our tendencies. I know realize that our reactions to failure can be wrestled with, reconstructed, and ultimately changed for the better.
Climbing is a really wonderful thing, in that you can very easily see a very direct correlation to effort, thought, and persistence. Your failure is right in front of you, a physical manifestation of what you're lacking; whether it be the last 20 feet of a climb, an incomplete training exercise, or a poor placement at a competition. This physical manifestation is one of the most helpful things about the failure you find in climbing. You have a very direct inspiration to do better, because you know what it takes to not fail. You know you need to push harder, fight deeper, and suffer for your goals. And, best of all, you can't just give up, because these are you're goals and your passions. You're driven to find it within yourself to fight harder. This is how my natural reaction to failure has changed. There has been more than a handful of times when my climbing desires and goals have not been met, but I learned that if I truly wanted to accomplish these goals, I needed to earn them. I needed to take failure head on, be willing to fail, to hurt, but to never give up.
Climbing has completely changed my failures. I still have them, they still hurt, but I am now willing to use them for inspiration. Thomas Edison once said, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." I think this quote really rings true of failure, because the more we are willing to fail and pick ourselves up again, the better and stronger we become. Our failures are just experiences with which we can learn how to be successful, so interestingly enough, the more we are willing to accept our failures and everything they bring, the more likely we are to succeed.
So what's my encouragement to anyone who is struggling with failure the same way that I did? Find something that inspires you, something that's physical, tangible and easy to see. This is your inspiration. Every time you want to give up, every time you want to go numb and wait for the pain to stop, and every time you fail, you think of this thing. For me, this might be a climb, or a workout, or a competition; for you, it may be different, but the failure is the same. If you have this truly inspirational thing that you want nothing more than, that you build a passion around, that you are willing to fight for, then you will find the will to keep climbing, keep pushing, to pick yourself up and try again and again. Effort, passion, and inspiration can change you from being the kind of person that quits, to the kind of person who will never give up at the sight of hardship.
