What did YOU fail at today? Whatever it was…celebrate that you tried something extraordinary.

We have all heard the failure-is-success thing so many times, in so many different ways.

Heck, I can tell you how many producers Sylvester Stallone took Rocky to before somebody finally said yes. Or how many experiments Edison went through trying to get the light bulb right. Fail forward. Fail fast. Failure is part of success. Failure is learning. Blah blah blah. I got it.

Or at least I thought I got it.

Then a few days ago I read something about Sara Blakely, the woman who founded Spanx, and for some reason THIS ONE hit me like a ton of bricks!

When she was growing up, her father would ask the kids, “What did you fail at today?” And then they would celebrate it.

Because if you didn’t fail at anything, maybe you didn’t try anything new. You didn’t try anything hard. You didn’t reach for something you weren’t sure you could do.

Do you get that??? It wasn’t really about celebrating failure. It was about celebrating that you tried something hard enough, new enough, maybe even absurd enough, that failure was a real possibility.

Sometimes you can hear something your entire life and then somebody changes five words and suddenly it sticks. This one stuck. And it’s already producing results.

I’ve reached out to a few people who were so far out of my league that I probably wouldn’t have even bothered. I got some really pleasant and beautifully surprising responses.

It doesn’t matter whether they responded. The win was that I reached out. Failing was the goal, but I tried something I might never have tried before.

So now I’m thinking about putting “What did I fail at today?” on my actual to-do list. LOL.

Did I try something new or difficult? Did I reach out to someone out of my league? Did I ask for something absurd? Did I do something where there was a pretty good chance somebody might say NO?

Maybe this connects with you and maybe it doesn’t. I’ve already tried explaining it to a few people and five minutes later some of them STILL didn’t get why I thought it was so profound. Maybe it’s just me.

But this one resonated and STUCK. So I’m sharing it, even if sharing it fails too.

What did YOU fail at today? Whatever it was…celebrate that you tried something extraordinary.

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P.S. Yes, I wrote this. ChatGPT helped with the grammar, punctuation and paragraph breaks because anyone who knows me knows I tend to write exactly the way I think—one long stream of consciousness. The thoughts, including the run-on ones, are mine. 😁