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.S. Senate and then again for Vice President. You get the idea - the guy failed and failed hard.
And yet, in 1860 he was elected President and today, by virtually anyone you could ask, he's revered as one of the better Presidents of this country. So which is it: was Abraham Lincoln an epic failure or was he successful?
You could argue both, but ultimately, none of us will really remember the times he failed. He probably did, but we won't. We will remember him having the courage to, you know, abolish slavery and the Emancipation Proclamation. We will remember someone who sought to unite during a time of deep division. We will remember someone who persevered.
Those failures of his very likely educated and informed how he went about navigating his future endeavors. He allowed those failures to forge and fuel his strength. One of the interesting things about his failures is that he was aiming high. His failures were for prominent roles. I'm sure he had lower-scale failures, but the failures listed above were significant. In other words, he went big (and, well, yes, sometimes went home). But in the end, when it was all said and done? He was a winner.
What we know is that he was fully aware of his failures. He's known as saying that "[m]y great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure." The guy with a laundry list of failures is not actually all that concerned about whether you succeeded, but whether you were comfortable enough to sit with your failure. This is a theme we've touched on before: you do not need to run from your failure. The only way to experience the failure is to sit with it and be content with it.
The most difficult part about failure is that there's a great deal of "Monday Morning Quarterback'ing." For those unfamiliar with that phrase, it essentially means second-guessing every important decision. Monday morning is the day after most football games are played and, well, Quarterback is the most important position on any football team. Taken together, the phrase entails re-evaluating our many decisions and what we could have done differently.
I'm pretty confident that most of the situations involving failure will also involve some sort of mistake or error that we committed. I think that's likely why Abraham Lincoln cared enough to ask if we would be okay, sitting content with our failures. What he really means to ask if we would be okay with the mistakes we made along the way. Can we live with those? The answer is, of course, yes we can. Will it be easy? Hell no, but that's the task before us.