“Without failure there is no achievement.”
John C. Maxwell
Good morning, friends! If your weekend was even half as wonderful as mine then you had a great time. I sure hope so. Now let’s get down to business.
I’ll bet you understand your fears pretty well. If you are self-aware at all then fears are one of the first awarenesses we develop in life. Most of our early life fears leave us with knowledge and experience, but curiously there’s one fear no child naturally has but life and experience unfortunately teach them: the fear of failure. The point here is not to assign blame for this fear, only to acknowledge the need to overcome it as we have all other irrational fears.
Something about our culture has suggested to us that success is the only acceptable outcome, when in fact there is no such thing as a straight line to success. Success isn’t even so much of a crooked like as a crooked and gapped line, pockmarked with failures and only reached by the determined. One young man failed six times in his applications to become an astronaut before finally being accepted into the program on his seventh try, right before retiring, instead going on to have a wonderful new career in the stars. Another young lady, a highly successful runner, failed in big marathons for years before finally breaking through with a big win in New York last year. Any success story you can name has lessons learned from failure.
* Are you learning positive lessons from failure or being defeated?
* Do you risk failure for success or avoid failure for mediocrity?
* Are you a friend of failure or afraid of failure?
To be sure, no one runs headlong into failure. That’s not the point. What I’m strongly suggesting is that any worthwhile run towards success will inevitably experience more than a few failures. If you’re afraid of failure then your journey will be short and disappointing. Recognize failure as what it is: a necessary byproduct of experiment and achievement. Then you can face it with courage and satisfaction, knowing that you are on your way to somewhere great. Send me a postcard! And have a great week!
Psalm 32
