Failure.   We fear it, we loath it, we criticize it.   We do anything we can to avoid it.  And when we do fail we do everything we can to put it behind an pretend it never happened.  But that’s just the problem.  Because we fear failure – we fail to act.  Because we want to forget failure we fail to learn from it.  And these are the two biggest failures of all and the reason there is so much mediocrity in the world.  In today’s connected world the spotlight is always on us, and the pressure to perform and deliver is intense.  But one of the unintended consequences is that we shrink from bold ideas and bold action because their too risky – and we might fail.  It’s just the wrong approach.  Rather we must embrace failure as necessary to the learning process.

This week I went for a five-pound weight loss, and 5% increase in my 5 mile speed and a 10-pound increase in my bench press.  These are huge goals for a single week.  I went all out, my diet was perfect, my mindset was positive, my workouts intense.  I burned over a thousand calories a day in exercise alone.  And I failed in each of my goals.  But did I?  The intensity of my workouts surely increased my endurance and strength.  That I didn’t lose weight means I need to review my diet and see if I’ve reached a point where I need to switch it up to keep moving forward.

Maybe I need to do the same for my weight workout.   It’s not the achievement or failure of this week that matters; it’s that I keep going for new strategies to move forward until I get there.