FAILURE

Failure: a medium-sized word with significant stature and the ability to strike fear into the hearts of many of our bravest, strongest and most successful.

As one who has experienced failure many times, I am fascinated by its power. Apparently, not just over me, but over many of the biggest names in the world. Most of us are scared to death of failure, living our lives and making life-altering decisions based on our fear of failure and our intense desire to avoid anything that remotely smells of failure.

Yet failure is the root of all success.

And that is what fascinates me most! I watch Donny Deutsch: The Big Idea www.bigideadonny.com on CNBC almost religiously, since I am constantly in search of inspiration for my own as-yet-to-be identified Big Idea. He recently did a series of shows on business failures and the leaders held responsible for those failures, and how they later succeeded in spite of them. We've all heard the stories about people who have tried and failed, then tried and failed again, only to ultimately emerge victorious. We've heard about baseball players who strike out three times in a game and then hit a home run that wins it.

What strikes me when I read or hear stories of triumph after failure is the wording frequently used: "... and he succeeded in spite of his mind-numbing failure!" When, in fact, it is always true that we succeed because of our failures! The very nature of a drug experiment, for example, requires hundreds of tests and failures before leading to a cure for disease. Best-selling author Brian Tracy says, "Failure is a prerequisite for great success. If you want to succeed faster, double your rate of failure."

Recently, my friend Carol www.northwestladybug.blogspot.com shared with me an article by Julie Wainwright, former CEO of Pets.com, the sort of Failure poster child for the dot-com era. Julie founded a new business and website, http://www.smartnow.com/, where she posted her article, Five Life-changing Mistakes and How I Moved On, at www.smartnow.com/page/5991. To say that I was moved by her article would be a gross understatement. She brought me to tears and inspired me at the same time. And my heart breaks for her - as it does for myself! and all of us who have experienced what we considered to be crushing failures - because each of us have experienced some of that pain and have somehow gotten beyond it. Some of us have risen to greater heights of success, some of us have simply endured, some of us have buried it deep in our histories, and some of us have used it as leverage, but while in the middle of it, we have rarely been able to see the forest for the trees and simply experience the frightening agony of walking through the deepest darkest woods alone.

And yet! If only we were able to take a step back from ourselves, our egos, during this trying time, and see what the Universe knows: that our life-altering failure is, at that moment, only a blip in time, and one that is absolutely necessary to achieving our ultimate destination: enlightened, fully-lived adulthood.

Even with that realization, I am myself a victim of this fact: failure breeds fear. Fear of trying, fear of failing, fear of succeeding(!), fear of not trying ... ! The list goes on. I have experienced failure all too often - and too recently - and am very nearly paralyzed by it. Even though, intellectually, I can take that mental step back and realize what is happening, I have been unable to emerge from it - to see the forest for the trees. Even though I know that nearly every failure I have experienced has resulted in a bigger - or entirely different - success, I have never developed a roadmap for getting there from here. It seems to have simply happened without my conscious effort, over time. And I just don't have the patience to wait!

So that will be my next post. I'll tell you about my (most recent!) failure and how I'm trying to get past it. And maybe you can help me out. Have you been stopped by failure? The fear of failure? The fear of success? Have you found a way to overcome it? What was your roadmap to success? Do you have a favorite "failure" quote? I'd love to hear from you. I have so much to learn!

- Grace

"What is there in a storm that moves me so? Why am I so much better and stronger and more certain of life when a storm is passing? I do not know, and yet I love a storm more, far more, than anything in nature." - Kahlil Gibran