The philosophy of failing and the need to embrace it

Perhaps I'm getting carried away. But so what, I haven't felt like this ever before, in all these years of presumably pretty productive life. Even if this is not real, let us be kind to ourselves, and pretend this is real.

Things happen for a reason, more or less. So I borrowed this book called Blank, and the importance of accepting and learning from failure couple of months ago. Never got around to reading it, or the subtitle either. Then I watched a video on youtube with a throwaway comment from an astronaut trainer on how experienced astronauts are so much better to work with, not because they are necessarily better, but because they accept failure better, and therefore can learn from it and recover better. That was like turning a bulb in my head. PINGGG. Okay, that makes sense, i've been wanting to play around with failure and acceptance all this time. And then I went back to the book Blank for some reason, and what do you know, it's about failure and its acceptance, and learning from it.

It IS a big deal because we are afraid of failing all the time in our day, all day every day. What if I don't finish it on time? What if my essay is crappy? What if my boss rejects this request? What if the cute girl insults and humiliates me? What if those cool people think I'm weird? What if things don't work out? What if I can't get any better? And so on and on and on. And you know what, maybe some of them we are right about too! We get delayed with our projects. Not all of our essays are projects. Not all requests get accepted. Cute girls can be mean and awful too. Cool people can have off days too, and they can find otherwise fine people strange, nothing off about that. The trick, it turns out, is to not take things that might otherwise seem personal, too personal. It's to detach yourself from events and their implications, and go on with the understanding the next you is going to be better, new and improved, thanks to the failure.

We need to understand failure is a part of our everyday life, it cannot be avoided. It is a friend, who we will see every so often, who tells us bitter truths, and sometimes just tells mean things in jest. But it's a useful friend. We cannot be afraid of it, we cannot run away from it. We need to welcome it, we need to become buddies with it, best friends even, and understand what it says and its communication style. You cannot avoid failure, the best you can do is to manage it and use it to make you better. So let's embrace failure!