Failure

It is a word that many enthusiasts frown upon. It is a word that many people don't think belongs in our vocabulary. I am here to tell you otherwise.

You see, even champions fail. Everyone fails. The problem occurs when we let our failures take control of our lives or when we are incapable to seeing our failures as a learning experience. Somewhere along our life timeline we forgot that failure was OK. We forgot that sometimes failure leads us to success.

When we were growing up we learned so many things. We learned how to speak, how to walk, how to ride our bike and so many other things. Was it easy? To be honest, none of us probably remember when we learned how to speak or to walk, but I can almost guarantee you we failed numerous times. Think about when we learned to ride our bikes. How many times did we fall? Probably many. Not only did we fall, but our falls varied in intensity. One day we riding for a few seconds before we stumbled off our bike and caught ourselves before we went face first into the street. Another day we couldn't even get the bike moving. Then one day we fell face first off our bike and scraped up our face, arm, and knee.

We've failed numerous times before, yet as we grow older we seem to forget that. As we grow, we tend to let our failures define who we are and who we are going to be. We dwell on the mistakes we made instead of the choices that left us happy.

Each day we will fail but, like riding our bike, some days these failures will be so trivial that we simply brush them off our shoulders. Other days we will feel like our day has been ridden with failures that we struggle to get through it. Other times our failures will knock us face first into the pavement and cut us up.

What is the point?

The only way we can move forward is if we acknowledge that our failures don't define who we are. When we failed ridding out bike we got back up and tried it again. That is the most valuable lesson we ever could have learned. When we fail we need to brush it off, learn from it, and keep living. Instead of letting our failures eat away at us and remind us of our weaknesses, we need to learn from them and attempt to prevent them from happening again.

Failures happen. We need to raise above our failures and learn that they do not define us. We are defined by how quickly we can get back on that bike and continue to learn.

Change

Change. It is probably the hardest thing we ever attempt to accomplish in our lives. We look at ourselves and see who we were. Many of us see who we are. Few of us see who we can become. One of my favorite sayings was discovered on a church message board. It read:

"Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future."

Now, on the church message board this saying was meant to carry religious meaning. It is there to remind us that the saints, like us, have sinned in their past but have changed and become the saints they now are. This blog isn't here to discuss religious belief, but I felt the saying can relate to our personal growth as well.

There is who you were. There is who you are. There is who you can become.

The first cannot change. Who we were was who we were and there is nothing we can do to change that. It is who we are and who we wish to become that we can change. I wrote in a previous post about us realizing we have to power to change ourselves. We have the power to become whoever we wish.

And the beauty of it all?

It is never too late. We can be young, middle-aged, or older, but we can always become whoever we want. Our future is in our hands. We have the choice to try and let it pass us by, or we can shape it and make it our own.

We, like the sinners, have a future. This future is as bright as the sun. We can shape it by inspiring to be who we always hoped to become.

Who do you hope to become?