Who loves to fail? …*crickets*… Exactly! We hate it! I hate whenever I make mistakes or get reprimanded because I didn’t do something right. To me, it’s one of the worst feelings in the world. My mom thinks I feel this way because I’m a perfectionist. I can see why she would think that, but when I think of a perfectionist, I think of an extremely organized person, with a planner the size of a bible and getting stressed out even over the minor details in everything they do. However, I guess there is different kinds of perfectionists, right?

Bottom line is, we wish failure wasn’t an option.

And boy, have I failed in my life throughout the years. The feeling never gets better even when I constantly tell myself, “it’s a part of life.” The one person I’ve always gone to when I’m being faced with this is my dad. When failure comes knocking on my door (or rather barging in uninvited), my dad tries to knock some sense into me. He makes my failures seem like some small but beautiful stone in the middle of my path.

There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.

Paulo Coelho, The alchemist

Instead of tripping over it, hurling it as far as I can out of anger, being upset that it’s in my way or being afraid to move it to the side, all I have to do is be more cautious, step over the stone, go around to avoid it, or taking matters into my own hands and placing it on the side where it won’t block my path again.

“There’s so much excitement in learning how to become knowledgeable. But the only way to learn is to fail. You have to look at the bright side, mami. Life is more about gaining then losing.” I never understood this until I really listened. I mean, it still sucks when things don’t go as planned or I’m in sticky situations but it’s in those moments that I play my dads words on repeat.

The ability to learn is one of the greatest gifts we’ve been given.

The ability to learn is one of the greatest gifts we’ve been given. If we focus on that rather than the moments when we’re unsuccessful, we’ll never want to be perfect. Failure does not make you a bad person, it does not make you worthless and it does not mean you can’t try again. Just as the sun rises and sets for every new day, so can you with every new trial, journey, or period in your life.

Only you have the power to give up. But when you give up, that’s when you’ve let failure win.