How To Fail

We may come to a place where we are so averse to failure that we avoid it at all cost …which maybe sounds like the path of success, but what tends to happen along that path is not the success we want.  What if, in order to succeed, rather than avoiding failure, what we need, is to become good at failure.

Do you know the story about the farmer who went out to plant seed in his field?

As he was scattering seed, some fell along the path; it was trampled on, and the birds ate it up. Some seed fell on rocky ground, and when it came up, the plants withered because they had no moisture.  Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up with it and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up and produced a hundred times more than what was planted.”

Do you see that most seed fails.  But if you look outside, it certainly does not appear so.  What if this story is saying, “most of what we try doesn’t work” ….but what does work, really works.  Most of our attempts fail but if we are persistent and generous enough with our attempts, a few of those attempts will be abundantly successful.

Do you see that this is already true in your life.  When you were little, you fell over and over again.  Learning to walk was failure upon failure …until it was a success.  Playtime was so much about repeating what didn’t work  …until it did work.  You and I grew so much when we offered generous allowance for failure.

We might come to believe, “Failure is embarrassing and shameful; failure means that we’re inferior; failure means we’ll never get it; failure means the door is closed; or maybe we can’t afford to fail?”   But avoiding failure will be our most disappointing failure.

If we must succeed, it will be necessary to learn to fail generously.

We must not be above failure.  We are born of failure.