success is personal.
so is failure.
two people can experience almost the same setback and walk away with completely different stories about what happened. one sees a dead end. the other sees information.
maybe that’s why I’ve started thinking of failure less as an event and more as an attitude.
Larry Mizel, the American real estate developer, once expressed this idea quite directly. when asked how he responded to failure, he reportedly answered that he couldn’t remember experiencing it. for him, failure was never an option.
I find that perspective interesting.
not because we can simply decide that every painful outcome isn’t a failure. some things genuinely don’t work. some choices hurt. some plans fall apart.
but what happens next is still partly ours to decide.
Theodore Roosevelt is often associated with the thought that the person who never makes a mistake is the person who never does anything. an early version of the saying was recorded by writer Jacob Riis in 1901.
there’s something quietly uncomfortable about that idea.
if we’re trying anything at all, mistakes are going to happen.
Thomas Edison had a similar way of looking at unsuccessful experiments. the famous version says, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” the exact wording is a later version, but an earlier account records Edison saying that he had gotten results and knew several thousand things that wouldn’t work.
that’s a very different way of counting.
instead of counting only what went wrong, you also count what you learned.
maybe that’s the real difference between a mistake that stops us and one that helps us grow.
a life without mistakes might look neat from the outside.
but it might also mean we never tried much.
a life filled with mistakes isn’t necessarily a wasted life. sometimes it’s evidence that we were curious enough to try, brave enough to begin, and willing to learn when things didn’t go according to plan.
failure can hurt.
it can disappoint us. it can humble us.
but perhaps it doesn’t have to define us.
sometimes, the most useful question isn’t, “why did I fail?”
maybe it’s simply:
what did this teach me that I didn’t know before?
and then, when we’re ready, we take another small step. 🤎
