inthedougout

I often like to ruminate.  I find it sort of fun, kind of like a sick, tortured hobby.  I sometimes take ideas and run them into the ground.  And yes, sometimes these are good ideas and other times, bad ideas.   Rumination most often fails to end well, however.  Rumination can quickly turn into unbounded worry.  And endless worry wreaks havoc on your mental state, physical state, and emotional state.  We always need to be mindful of pushing and pulling the different levers... such as "let yourself feel the emotion," but let's be realistic: not for too long. When I find myself in a "worry spiral," it usually takes me a few moments, or days, before I catch myself and realize this incredibly helpful mantra: do not worry alone.   In that same vein, why fail alone? Tonight, at the dinner table, my wife put this idea into practice.  She asked each of us to describe "how did we fail today?"  This was, of course, not an invitation for ...

The reason I give a shit about failure is that we all fail.  It is a fact of human life.  And if we all fail, what are we supposed to do with all of this failure that's been piling up?  For me, personally, I didn't know what to do with all of the failure.  It sat and sat and  sat.  Eventually, it began affecting my ability to perform at a level I'm comfortable with (and to be clear, when I am not performing at a high level, I get this existential itch that bothers the hell out of me). A brief detour: a paradox is a statement or situation that seems to contradict itself or go against common sense.   Returning to the point: failure, at least the way we view it, is a bit of a paradox.  That's because failure is most typically experienced as something negative (i.e., the "oh man, that sucks" situation).  By letting that be the end of the story, we are depriving ourselves of a powerful catalyst for developing and growth.  Bumpy roads, ef...

The funny thing about failure is that people are rarely remembered solely  for their failures.  Most observers may not even realize that someone has even endured a particular amount of failure. One of the best examples of this is Abraham Lincoln.  Did Abraham Lincoln really lose 8 elections?  Did you even know that Abraham Lincoln lost 8 elections?  What's really fascinating about Abraham Lincoln is that the dude failed far more than he succeeded.  According to abrahamlincolnonline.org , the guy persisted through what I'd perceive to be a ridiculous amount of failure.  Enough failure to make most of us curl up into a ball and hide in the closet.  Let's run through what happened to him, though briefly, of course.   Between 1832 and 1858, he lost his job, had a failed business, had a nervous breakdown, was defeated for speaker, had a failed bid for Congress, eventually lost a re-nomination, was rejected for land officer, was defeated for U...