I recently was listening to an interview by Elizabeth Day about failure and it got me thinking about failures I have had in my life. I suppose they start from School when I was put into the small group which needed extra help with work, never feeling particularly cool or proud of myself at School, not having someone to ask to our Leaver’s Ball, indeed being very much the red light while all the friends around me seemed to find it so easy to be green, having to cut my contract short on my first job, failing with my health and having to have an operation to sort it, and now ultimately living back at home with my parents as a single thirty three year old and not quite sure what direction my life is going to go.
On the face of it one would assume I was a complete drop out and failure in every way, yet I have never been happier. I was ticking all the supposed boxes for a while; seeing someone nice, working in London, watching Netflix, moaning about life yet it never made me happy. Just living life and making decisions based on ‘what everyone else does’ is a recipe for disaster because there is no rule book. Society and your friends do not really care, obviously they want you to be happy (and not breaking the law) but beyond that they are all just busy trying to not fail in their own lives.
The only person who has to answer and be affected by decisions you take is you. What looks like a failure to one person can be a huge success to another, it is just our perception of it, that and, to a degree, what society dictates we should be doing- but right now with COVID restrictions society has pretty much gone up the spout and so if there’s ever a time to break free of that sort of pressure now’s as good a time as any. I believe, at the heart of it, every failure is really a great big success in disguise. So, you should have as many failures as you can and you will be much the stronger and happier person for them.
