Failing is a part of life.
If you're ever going to try and do your best, give 100%, at anything then you are going to fail. Once, twice? Probably an uncountable amount of times. And the absolutely shitty part about that? Failure stings, maybe it confirms your cognition you had prior to trying or maybe it creates new ones, telling you that you just can't do this, no matter how hard you try. Even worse, failure stops us from attempting things again, the sting is painful but you can't lose if you don't play? Right?
I fell into this latter category for most of my life, not willing to commit fully to anything because commitment meant the possibility of just proving to the world, and worse, to myself that maybe I just wasn't cut out to; write, skate, get top in maths class, play soccer, talk to pretty girls, be social, paint, make music on my guitar and the list can go on and on, there's hundreds of things I wanted to be good at in my life growing up, from adolescent to young adult that I never fully committed to, but something changed?
I can't pinpoint when or why it changed, and I'm sorry because maybe that would be helpful if you're in the same boat as 19 year old Jared but I can't quite help you there, but maybe I can introduce you to the process that has become the norm for me when facing a stinging loss.
Failure means learning, more often than not doing badly at something we are trying mean's that we're doing this hobby or activity voluntarily, or at least the amount of effort we choose to put in is voluntary and that fortunately means that we get to make another attempt (if we're up to the task) lucky us we already have experience, from failing, losing and disappointing ourselves. It's not a great feeling but to put it rationally doing something wrongs means that at the very least we now know what NOT to do.
Ok so i now know that I don't know how to do this so that means that now I can try again and do something different. If we're learning a new skill and we're not sure where we slipped up this experience of failure means we can try again but change how we try, thus going through the process of elimination, even better if after a failed attempt we can take a moment to be introspective and observe where and when things went wrong. If I know where I went wrong, I can work on that part of my pop up on a surf board for example, or I can go to someone who know's how to write a better flowing essay, the internet is an amazing resources for this, try-fail-google-try again.
It can be tiresome, it can be demoralising but here's the thing about practice, if you keep getting up and trying each time you fail, not only do you get better at that specific skill, but you get better at getting up and trying again when faced with failure for each other skill. It's the best thing I started trying to do but I'm not going to pretend that I'm good at it, in fact the reason I'm writing this post is because tonight at my fundamentals BJJ class I felt like a failure, my opponent had a very obvious advantage over me, more control and I couldn't stop him from passing my guard, I let myself get frustrated, I left myself get angry, I didn't take the time to notice what I was doing wrong, or what he was doing right, I left frustrated and stung, and it took time, a few hours, to come back to it objectively, and think about how I was going to do better next time. And that's all you can really ask of yourself sometimes isn't it?
Failure sucks, but learning is great, but learning is going to happen from failing most of the time, so get back up and try again, or maybe it's just time to start trying?
