Celebrating Failure - Week 13

1.     As lame as it sounds, something I failed at the most this semester was getting up early for a run on the weekends.  Although this is seemingly insignificant, it represented a significant mental block for me this semester.  In high school I was able to do this almost every weekend, but over the past weeks I have not once been able to push myself to get out of bed to get going.  I will often end up sleeping till 9 o’clock whereas I used to be able to get up around 6:30 and then relax after my run in the morning. 

2.     I think the biggest thing I learned from this was that if I am miserable in what I’m doing as a job (In my case school), it affects pretty much every other aspect of my life as well.  It causes me to lose motivation for almost everything I am passionate about.  This problem caused me to realize that no matter what, having a career/business that I am passionate about is so much more important than the money I make from it.  While money is important to be able to live comfortably and provide for the people you care for, it is not worth being miserable over.  This gave me the ability to see that I needed to change my major, even though it means a smaller chance of monetary success. 

3.     Failure sucks.  When it comes down to it though, it is one of the most important steps in our lives, as it sparks a drive that nothing else can.  Any successful person I have ever talked to often talks more about their failures than their successes.  In my opinion, this is because when someone only thinks about their successes, it leads to complacency, which is perhaps the most dangerous force fighting against an entrepreneur.  When I have to deal with failure, I let it control me.  Most people would not see this as a good thing but when I do this, it helps me look at things in a far different perspective than my normal one.  I don’t let this effect how I interact with people, but my work ethic often becomes much better and it gives me the motivation to do things that I wasn’t doing before that I wish I had been doing.   Overall I don’t really think this class has changed my perspective on failure, as there was nothing that struck me very deeply throughout the assignments/interactions.  It did help with being able to talk to strangers however, which has an element of failure in it.  Even when I was not able to get someone to talk to me, I realized it made me learn how to best adapt so that people would feel comfortable talking to me.