Author: Andrea Grassi

If I look back at my failure I can clearly see that something in the way I digest that information has changed over the years.

In the beginning failure, for me, was total destruction, surrender, a condition I couldn’t escape.

When I remember one of my work-failures I can remember how it made me feel, how my stomach grasped for air, how I felt powerless, useless, utterly trash.

Thanks to growing up, meditation, and a lot of introspection and work now that doesn’t happen anymore, but there are some similarities.
There are times when I feel like I’m not at the level of my competitor, that they are crushing me.

Or where I feel I got too much at stake and I should simply give up.
Giving up is my default answer to pain and depression. It’s my symptom that a hidden area of my brain wants to take control of what I built over many years.

But those times, the one I don’t feel at ease, are now a moment for me to pause and think about the distances.
The distance in term of skills, of knowledge, of preparation.

What could I do better? How could I prepare better? How could’ve know the missing piece of information I needed?

When you want to stack up against the best, you’ll fail. That’s part of the plan, because if you were already the best, why even bother competing?

That failure is much different now from years ago and maybe it’s all because now it’s not “my failure” as in “The Human I am”, but now it’s always correctly framed as a failure in missing skills or preparation.

It’s a learning path, while years ago it was a roadblock.

One thing we learn as kids is that, from time to time, we can do something wrong, but have no one actually noticing it.

We can get away with it if we can hide the evidence, the proof, then you’re fine.

It’s a toxic mindset that follows us through a big part of our life.
Each time we do something wrong, we still have that lingering thought, that hope that, if we do all the things in the correct order, we might still get away with it, we might avoid the confrontation, the public failure.

We fall for this trick. It’s so easy and so relieving to not be blamed or faulty, to actually be on the winner side.

Until we get exposed, until someone finds out.

The thing is: We cannot really hide. We can try, and we might win some of the battles, but in the end there will be always someone that finds our trick.

So, better be prepared, take full responsibility and stand up for what we believe in.
We might be wrong, we might do something in a bad way for good reasons, and yet we should take full responsibility for that.

The underlying issue with the child that’s thinking “I should hide the evidence” is that, if the evidence gets out, we’re less good, we’re less skilled, we lose something.

It’s actually the opposite. It’s when we hide and get exposed that we lose something very important: Credibility and trust. Two things we should fight for.

We do all fear failure and we skip the trying part. We avoid trying something new, because it creates uneasyness.

But this is where the learning starts, when you learn new skills, when you go over an beyond your limits.

You can’t do that if you don’t try.You’ll only be able to do the minimum.

There’s a topic I come back to very often, and it’s the fact that consistency trumps everything.

Keep moving is the best way to reach a goal, to get to the end of something.
I saw this recently while reading a book on how to raise children.

It’s hard to raise them because we surrender, we give up, we stop holding the line, while we should do the opposite.

We don’t fail because it’s hard, we fail because we give up.

Our socials are a way to hide our struggles. The pretty faces, the smiles. They are like paintings, a moment in time, but they do not show our pain, our struggle with anything in life.

And we do struggle, each one of us, each day. That’s why a wise man says to always greet with a smile because you don’t know what battles the person you’re facing is fighting.