It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.
As we wind down 2019, I wanted to use that time to address failure.
Failure is a teacher. It is not something to get upset about or worry about. Failure shows you how not to do something. It teaches us where we went wrong. If we pay attention. If you fail and learn nothing, the true failure is failing to learn something.
I set some stretch goals at the beginning of the year. Did I meet all of them? No. Was I planning to miss the mark? No. That’s what stretch goals are about. You stretch beyond what you did previously to see if you can pull it off. I’ll get into detail in a later post when I do my end-of-year evaluation and reset for next year, but when you achieve more, feel great! When you fail to achieve what you set out to do, learn from it. Did you stretch too far? Did you miss some principle or lack the technique or ability to do more? This is where the true wins are. You can fail over and over and over again. The key is to keep going.
Here’s my weekly schedule:
- Blog daily
- Work on my Story Beats daily
- Exercise daily
- Meditate daily
- Socialize daily
- Journal daily
- Learn daily
- Code daily
- Share articles and quotes daily
When you set your goals for next year (hopefully sometime this month), keep in mind that you may fail to achieve some of them. That’s OK. Goals are meant to stretch us. Sometimes you can’t stretch enough to achieve them. The real benefit of this exercise is to continue to do better than you did yesterday.
Until next time…
Dave