Persistence

As a father, I push my daughter to fail.  As a teacher, I encourage my students to fail.  As a friend, I love seeing my friends fail. As a member of society, I am happy to see when a culture fails.  Failure is frightening. Failure is taxing. Failure is difficult. Failure is important. “There is no success without failure and losses.” John C. Maxwell.  Progress does not occur without there being a struggle. The difficulty is fear. Most people fear failure.

There is a cliche I recall from being a child I apologize that I may not quote this accurately, but if I recall it is something like: That which doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.  Sure, it makes sense, working towards progress will allow you to become stronger and more secure. Making progress means you will go through struggles and difficulties. Making progress you will have to expose yourself to failure.  Making progress requires that you learn from your failure.

Do not allow your struggles, your failure to stop your progress.  Push on and be persistent. Understand that being persistent does not mean working hard or continually working. Being persistent means working through troubles, working through difficulties, overcoming obstacles, and having perseverance.  Do not allow discouragement to be the end of your quest for progress; show persistence to find lessons within each failure.

A child who works hard gets good grades, but doesn’t struggle may have a decent life. A child who struggles, fails, and overcomes will excel in life. Even if school and/or life comes easy to a child, but they are pushed to fail they will gain more from their failures than from their successes.  What if you stop risking failure?

My urgent revolt against social media could be seen as a paradox or even me being a hypocrite.  After all, I have expressed that I am terrible at social media. Being terrible at social media, I am a failure; should I not learn from my failures and get better at it, succeed.  Most people, whose opinions I respect, suggest that I should not feel bad about sucking at social media, and frankly, the largest reason why I am not good at social media is that I cannot get myself to indulge in the self-gratifying motif, the farce, of social media.  Frankly, I’m okay with the presentation of being a hypocrite because I feel the continual self-indulging social media provides for lack of willingness to embrace failure; as well as many other plagues upon humanity and society as a whole.

Pursue to fail.  Make mistakes. Don’t limit yourself by allowing your failures to be validated, use your failures to grow.  Excel to do better, perpetually, because we can always do better.