I Failed… There I Said It!

I failed in my marriage. I failed in a business. I failed a lot… I will fail again, and probably pretty often.

Wow. I failed.

Those are probably the greatest, but the hardest, words you will ever say to yourself about yourself. They’re even harder to say out loud when others “may hear” them. When you know for sure that they will hear, it becomes monumentally harder.

That brings me to the situation my business partner and I faced on June 1st.

A little history leading up to the first of June, and the monumental, life-changing situation we faced: I refused to fail. I had watched my marriage collapse a year prior. Over the last twelve months, I watched the business we’d built fall victim to Covid and the crippling restrictions imposed on small businesses — and I was determined not to have another failure in my life.

Less than a month earlier, I completed the #75Hard challenge with “zero failures,” and believe me when I say, most people fail at least once. But I refused. I succeeded. Zero failures.

In the days, weeks and months leading up to this new deadline, I had moved the finish line multiple times. In other words, this wasn’t the first deadline — it was about the tenth. And I never “failed,” because I just simply changed the due date so I wouldn’t miss it and fail at something else.

Failing is the worst thing you can do. Or is it?

We had set a “final” deadline of May 31st to make sure several things were in place. Now here we were, on June 1st. So when I realized we had missed yet another deadline, I sat down with Larry to justify it — and to reschedule it to the next time we would, undoubtedly, miss (notice I didn’t say fail).

We had already postponed and rescheduled and postponed and rescheduled… then I got so mad at myself, and at Larry, for allowing us to fail and reschedule. Why was I angry? Because it goes against everything I truly believe. It’s crippling to your process and it derails your success. It gives you a false sense of progress.

I made the decision right then and there to acknowledge the failure. Whatever the results may be — including the fact that we’d decided if we missed another deadline we’d most likely discontinue that business — they were just going to be that. Consequences and all.

The Lesson

The craziest thing happened next. The pressure was off. All of the reasons why we hadn’t completed our task suddenly became less important. It was over.

Were my dreams shattered? No. Was I disappointed? No. Was I mad? No. What did I feel? Relieved. Grateful. Off the hook.

Were there consequences for my actions and my failures? Of course. Let’s be real for a second — I did fail. But here’s what I realized: completing my task and not failing had become more important than the task itself. The goal behind what I was doing was to make my company better, to make me better, to make us better. But in the pursuit, I forgot what I was chasing. I was so much more concerned about staying in the race than I was about winning.

You might say that’s the wrong way to look at it. I’d say that for the logical observer on the outside looking in, it’s absolutely the wrong way. But when you’re in the thick of it, you don’t care. Well, I didn’t anyway… Am I really that different from you? Doesn’t it sometimes become more important to say I did that versus the benefit of having actually done it?

What followed was about what you’d expect. We licked our wounds and faced the truth of the failure. And in the truth of that failure was a freedom that had eluded us every time we moved the finish line. Things began to flow — ideas, creativity, opportunities. They’re everywhere.

We aren’t horses. We don’t need blinders.

There’s a valuable saying: “I never lose. I win, or I learn.” When I was a kid learning to ride a bike, I didn’t say I failed at learning to ride a bike 77 times. Falling is part of the process. Failure will inevitably be — and always has been — part of the story of your journey. Embrace it. Laugh at yourself. The world is going to do enough laughing at you, so you might as well beat them to the punch. Only when you can laugh in the face of your own failure will you see the beauty of the lesson.

So I say to you in closing: I failed. And you’re not going to believe how much I won because of it.