# Chapter 69

No matter how many famous people talk about their failures, I find that most people, myself included, have a very difficult time feeling the solid connection to failure and success. Yet if you have achieved any level of success within your field, then you very likely have had lots of failures, because that is almost always the path to success. Don’t be confused by how this sounds on paper, it sounds binary and mechanical and simple. Real life is messy and hurtful and difficult and emotional and our failures and successes take long meandering paths to our doors. And please hear me well, I don’t want to celebrate failure. There is nothing more disturbing and boring than the American competitive trauma about who has had the most difficult life, and who had more bootstraps and who had the darkest pit to climb out of, and who had the most trauma, and the least loving mother, blah blah blah. This is not failure, this is a celebration of pain and drama and poor pitiful me.

Failure is essentially a learning process, where some action or decision or understanding or skill or knowledge did not meet the expectations and requirements of whatever you were working on or toward. It is this definition and experience of failure that always leads one to success, assuming that you have now gained that action, understanding, skill or knowledge that you lacked before this point. It is negative only in the sense that you have to wait longer to achieve your desired outcome. Everything else is a win. And this is the part that is so difficult to feel in the correct and healthy way. Failure feels like a loss, not a gain, it feels like a negative not a positive, it feels like losing not winning. But those feelings are not accurate.