When Something Fails it Doesn't Mean YOU are a Failure!

We talk a lot about accomplishment and success in our world but — truth be known — an awful lot of things don't turn out as expected, and many of them can best be described as outright failures.

Of course, we humans are pretty well equipped to deal with our successes, but failures can be a lot harder to work through. What is especially challenging is to not take the failure of "something" so personally that we start believing that we are failures, in life.

In most cases, we're not. Aside from which... failure is almost always a temporary state of affairs.

I expect it is pretty much in our nature to try to assign blame somewhere, when something goes wrong. And yet? Sometimes there is no "fault," and what happened was merely part of the natural evolution of things.

Consider this simple example: When digital printing replaced manual typesetting it didn't mean that a master typesetter was suddenly a failure!

I write these words as someone who has experienced lots of failures in my life. As I enter the final third of my days on this planet, I have gradually come to embrace the idea that these were all experiences that helped shape the person I am, today.

Some things you just can't predict! And it's not your fault!

In the late 1990's, I landed a really good position with a company that created skills/aptitude tests for 100's of different professions and tasks. I was thrilled about it because I had felt very unsure about my future after closing down my 13-year old business that I had poured my heart and soul into...

But no more that four months after I started a rewarding and well-paying job the company was bought out by a much larger organization... and half the workers — basically the most recent hires — were let go. Bye-bye, dream job!

But thanks to a small miracle of coincidences, I ended up almost immediately finding an even better job with a start-up company developing educational gaming software and apps for children and teenagers.

Great people, even better pay, meaningful work and with it... a great sense of hope that I had found something amazing that wasn't just "Big Corporate."

But after about three months, and really starting to "find my place," one of the "silent partners" decided to pull out their investment for "personal reasons" (a gambling addiction, it turned out) and suddenly my second dream job in a year went away as lawsuits forced a bankruptcy liquidation, and everyone was left out on the street with no job.

Both of these misfortunes, coming immediately on top of my own business closure, definitely put me in a very bad place, emotionally and psychologically. What was wrong with me, that everything I touched seemed to just crumble into nothingness?

And it took me a while to work past "identifying" myself with these "failures."

At such a time, it can be difficult to "get outside our heads" and examine what happened from an objective perspective.

The business I had closed — my import-export business and retail store — didn't end because I did anything wrong. It ended because the shopping center operator went bankrupt, sharp exchange rate fluctuations had affected our expenses and prices more than 50% in a "bad" direction, and because a 3-year city road project had all but cut off our customers from being able to access our business.

More than 50% of the other businesses around us also closed down, so I was in good company, you might say!

The lifelesson here — challenging and unpleasant as it may be — is that sometimes failures and endings happen for no reason other than simple misfortune we have no personal control over.

As such, blaming ourselves, and thinking ourselves to be failures is actually taking on the blame for something we're not to blame for. Even though it might feel differently, at the time!

So... when something bad happens, and you feel guilty about it... ask yourself whether it's really your fault!

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great week ahead!

How about you? Have you ever felt like a failure, even though it wasn't YOU who failed? Do you have a tendency to assume responsibility for things that are not yours to own? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)

Created at 2024.02.11 23:45PST
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