A Beautiful Failure

Let me be clear right now about your latest derailing of your goals; it will not define you.

The extra food that you ate, the missed fitness class, the duvet day or the excessive alcohol that you drank will not define your success or your failure.

You have simply experienced a moment in time that didn’t fit in with your goals. Fuck it. Move on.

I like to give the occasional quote by some literary genius or scientist to emphasize my point in my blogs, but this time I present to you a football manager… Liverpool’s Jürgen klopp. This week, in the same week that I lost the sale of my house, thus waving goodbye to a very nice house in Bem De Fe, practically having a none existent exercise routine creating an appetite for poor nutritional food and Liverpool facing knockout in the Champions League against Real Madrid, Klopp gave me a golden piece of wisdom.

“Just try. If we can do it, wonderful. If not, then fail in the most beautiful way.”

Fail in the most beautiful way. I love that sentence. We fail all the time. And when we do, we have two options. We can either crumble and give in, or we can learn something from it and go again.

How do we fail? In our daily lives we get situations that let us down, we divert from our personal goals, we forget something important, we are disappointed in our behaviour or don’t give a good account of ourselves. These are all things that we have to deal with. Managing this and responding to it is where the real success happens.

Failure does not define you, but your reaction to it will.

So when you fail, do it in the most beautiful way.