Win or Learn

How do you view success and failure?  Do you see these as existing at two ends of a spectrum, mutually exclusive of each other, and often the motivation behind ceaseless striving and relentless self-criticism?

It has taken me many years to realize that life doesn't need to be a matter of strictly winning or losing, celebration or dejection.  When we don't achieve a goal, we gain the opportunity to learn, make adjustments, and, most importantly, to try again. We lose when we allow ourselves to get caught up in the binary of success or failure, missing out on opportunities to course-correct and approach a problem or work towards a goal differently.

It is amazing how limiting this black-and-white, all-or-nothing way of looking at life can be and how much of our potential we miss out on realizing, simply because we decide at the first negative outcome that we weren't meant to achieve the goal that we have set.  As someone who personally sets high standards, I find it incredibly difficult to accept anything that falls below what I believe is acceptable, and there is nothing harder than admitting I'm not quite ready yet and need to put more work in before trying again.  How much easier it would be to simply admit defeat and move on to a new pursuit.

Power lies in shifting to a growth mindset where we can appreciate these perceived failures as clues regarding what our next best action could be.  This is not an easy practice to adopt because our pride often stands in the way.  It's hard to admit that something we thought would be successful wasn't and that we may need to back up and adjust our "perfect" plan to achieve what we had in mind.  School continues to be one of the most humbling spaces I exist in for this very reason.  The subjective nature of our assignments means that even when I think I have hit a homerun, sometimes it doesn't land with the person whose job it is to grade it, and back to the drawing board I must go.

Reframing losing as learning helps to smooth the rough edge of perceived failure.  It allows us to view our efforts as still counting for something, as moving us closer to our end goal.  So maybe there will be a few extra steps than what we had counted on or planned.  Is that the end of the world?  Ego may say yes, but vulnerability will say no.  Allowing ourselves to sit with the grey of a maybe here and there is not the end of the world, and may actually be just the beginning of a whole new way of moving forward, instead.