fail.

Remember that gluten free waffle recipe you tried? It smelled so good and you opened the lid and it was still mushy, and crumbled apart when you tried to remove it. You know what holds the batter together, you know what has worked for other recipes in the past, so you thought you’d try it with the Sunday morning waffles. Looks from your family? Yep, Fail.

We all have knowledge, and there will always be MORE knowledge we feel we don’t have. So where does this leave us? Paralyzed and frozen, stuck in the knowledge we THINK we have and unable to grow? You know it is OKAY to not know everything, but to know JUST ENOUGH to take that first step? FAILURE. We really only know where we are in this world when we fail, and failure can come in so many forms, it can come in that just barely making it through, the lucky moment we didn’t crash, the fall that didn’t break the wrist, the presentation that didn’t flop, the forgetting the words or the info but coming out on the other side, that discovery of a better way to do something, by accident. We need to recognize when things don’t go as planned, which they hardly ever do, that in those moments we need to LEARN what didn’t go well instead of basking in the PHEW I did it, and the next time approaching that same situation in a slightly different light. Failure and the ACCEPTANCE of failure are the only ways in which we will grow, learn, improve, help more people, better ourselves, move closer to mastery. Do you really think that all of the people you look up to, all of the mentors and masters and Jedis you follow through life are really all that much smarter than you? They just learn from each of their failures, and they persevere, they don’t look back and they don’t put on the blinders and they don’t think they KNOW EVERYTHING. In fact, the exact opposite. They know they don’t know everything, so they open themselves up to possibilities, to learning, to growing, to ACTION and that each tiny success is built out of a larger failure. A master is someone that has put all of those failures to use, turned around and studied the map behind them, always moving forward on a slightly new path.
So, I ask you, how will you fail today?