All I Do Is Win

Except for the times I fail

A Pic of Me Successfully Achieving a Goal! Please ignore the fact that I am so sweaty that my shorts are plastered to my legs

When we enter our middle school years and become aware of our need to fit in and be accepted, we desperately try to control what others know about us. We become fixated on only sharing and displaying the good parts of life. The years when I was in middle school, we had to deal with the old fashioned word of mouth gossip mill. Now we live with the gossip mill on steroids, AKA social media. I cannot imagine being a teenager in 2024 and forming my identity while trying to display it perfectly for my peers to analyze. Word of mouth and covertly slipped handwritten notes made the blast zone for gossip so much smaller and easier to control.  Social media has led us all to live in a prolonged state of adolescence where we are conscious of image and how we are projected.  Adults, as well as kids, try so hard to show only the good parts of life, the so called successes. We all just want to fit in and be perceived as winning. 

When you see someone projecting a life that only consists of wins, it begins to feel inauthentic. We all know that being human means making mistakes and failing. Being an adult means that the mistakes and failures become more serious and unfortunately, more frequent. If we are being truthful, the more successful someone is in life, the more likely they are to have experienced a great number of failures. I don’t wish for an Insta feed full of stories of disappointment or stumbles, but I do appreciate and celebrate a success more when I know what it truly took to get there. I want to be able to relate and know people for who they actually are instead of a curated, projected image. When I have any type of success, I think “if you only know what it took” and honestly, I do want to know what it took! I want to know how people deal with insecurities, doubts, and stumbles. I want to know how other people face challenges and full blown mistakes and still succeed. 

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and the definition of failure is just as individualized. Sometimes goals aren’t met, we get answers wrong, or what we are trying to accomplish just doesn’t work. Whether or not these things are considered a failure is determined by how we think and process our errors. To me, the word failure means a situation that is completely worthless- a total waste of time and life. By my definition, if falling short of a goal leads to reflection and learning, then this is not a failure. An error that provides knowledge and leads to the next step has immense value. Hurdles are part of the process of life. I’m not saying that everything happens for a reason or has a silver lining if we just try hard enough to see it. Some things in life do turn out to be a total waste of time. Sometimes the best lesson learned can be an emotion- anger, sadness, frustration- that you will do anything to avoid again. That desire to try to not experience that feeling again has value. Taking actual steps to prevent it in the future is a success. If an error or undesired outcome leads to no advancement in knowledge or no change in behavior, then that is a failure. What we define as a personal failure can be placed on a sliding scale of value- some stumbles don’t teach much and are processed and released with low value. Some are stepping stones to something even better. The determination of that value of a setback is up to us as individuals. You get to assign the amount of importance to everything in your life. Take something like getting a college degree. Some people don’t pursue one and don’t think twice about it, it isn’t a setback, it is simply a life choice. Not getting a college degree doesn’t register on their personal sliding scale of failures because it isn’t one.  Some people do want to get a college degree, but ultimately don’t and then spend their lives feeling shameful. This is very simplified, but the same life choice is seen by a failure as one and is carried around with shame and the other just sees it as a life choice and it doesn’t even register. When looking at your life and your choices, you get to decide which ones you will carry with you and which ones can be processed and released. 

When deciding that value, we often give undo weight to the input of other people. When I am honest with myself, I know that what other people think of my choices or behavior is just a creation of my own mind, my perception. This is exactly the thinking that was kicked off in those pre-teen years. We spend so much time attributing thoughts and feelings to those around us and spin them into facts like a one person game of Telephone. When I stop caring about what other people think of my life choices, I have a lot less judgment of myself and I can value mistakes or so called failures for what they are and not how they make me look. I have a few people in my life who I will go to for input and advice, but these are people who accept me for who I am and not how I project into the world. I may use these people to help me process my own thoughts and feelings, but I don’t use their’s to determine the value of my wins or losses. Suppressing the adolescent reflex to feel shame and embarrassment lets me get over the disappointment much quicker and use it to make the next choice in life. 

Also, as an adult, I’ve realized one of the most important things- no one else is thinking about you. At least not for more than a few seconds. We all have so much going on with trying to be human adults that fixating on other people’s life choices is pretty far down the To-Do List. Our favorite thing to think about is ourselves, so don’t worry if someone knows you didn’t get the job you wanted or you have had another breakup.  Other people might think about it for a second, but then they will get a notification of their phone or pass by a reflective surface and quickly start thinking of themselves again. We might care about each other as a community, but the individual parts are consumed in their own minds. Go ahead and make as many mistakes as you want, no one else is keeping track! 

If we don’t have missteps and failures, then we also don’t really have success. Success feels so good because the possibility of failure exists. You need to know what each end of the spectrum feels like to because they are defined by the existence of the other.  If I achieved every goal exactly as I initially planned, then I wouldn’t appreciate the outcome. When I become invested by trying something, analyzing my choices, and taking action then I appreciate the outcome even more. I feel more successful when I put in effort and I am tested. Falling short of a goal feels so crappy because my brain lets me know what success would have felt like if I wasn’t a failure. When goals come easily and as expected, I am of course happy, but I also often forget about the experience or the feelings around it. I think that success without failure feels like luck. When I feel lucky, I don’t feel like I had an actual impact on the outcome. I enjoy the success, but I don’t necessarily learn anything, it feels undeserved. I do have times in life where I appreciate not having to learn anything, but a lifetime of green lights seems like it would produce an uninteresting person. 

Whether or not we can spin our failures into gold, I think it is also worth taking some time to think about how we react to setbacks. Completely set aside if a mistake can lead to a lesson or if it can ultimately still lead to success and think about how you treat yourself when you don’t meet your expectations. Is your internal monologue saying mean things? I know that I say things to myself that I wouldn’t ever think about another person. It is so easy for me to give other people grace and not make judgments about their character based on life stumbles. With myself, I tend to slip into basing my worth as a person into how perfect I can perform. I don’t consciously strive for perfection, but I am great about using my errors as evidence for those nasty, creeping beliefs that I am not good enough or that I am a failure. This is something that I have to very intentionally work on. I am not my mistakes. I am not my failures. At the very same time, I am not a list of successes. I can put my life into a bullet pointed list, but it would fail to actually capture who I am. 

Perceiving failure as a statement on character also leads to fear. Fear of failure often results in fear of even trying. These fears might feel like protection or comfort, but when constant they can cause paralysis and stagnation.  I find comfort in routines and knowing what to expect, but I also get bored and frustrated when life feels like living the same day over and over. When I start to get that feeling, I know it is time to try something new. Stepping out and actually trying can be something small like a new hair color or different restaurant, but it can also be something large like a career pivot or moving to a different city. The consequences of failing at trying something small vs trying something large might be on the opposite ends of impact on life, but the feelings behind choosing to try or not are the same.  If we are afraid to try the small things, we will let this fear stop us from trying the large things too.

Knowing that you get to decide what is a failure and what is a success in your life doesn’t make challenges feel easier while you are in the process, but when you are analyzing and making the next choice, letting go of the shame and disappointment can feel so good and lead to a well deserved success. I hope that you are able to gain wisdom from whatever you consider a failure in your life and I hope that you share that wisdom with others. Being human is not easy so being honest and vulnerable with each other lightens our mental load and the value of your wisdom is found in the sharing. 

P.S. You should know that I recently as I was going to sleep, I reached for my phone cord and as I extended my body, I fell out of my bed. In the sliding scale of value, I do consider this an absolute failure. Feel free to laugh at the wisdom I gained from this literal flop.

I hope you are having a great week. I would love to hear about something that you may have considered a failure in your life, but has given way to a success! Or feel free to share a total flop that would put you in contention on America’s Funniest Videos ;)