“Failure” can take on many shapes and sizes, from not keeping our word, falling short of expectations, or simply losing.

Failure is not black and white, however. It is not always binary in the sense of winning or losing. Take the case of “falling short of expectations”, for example. If a (public) company’s earning fall short of analyst expectations, the stock price drops.

Apple will sometimes “miss” on revenue (which is a made up future number) and suffer a stock price drop, despite earning tens of billions of dollars.

Did they truly “fail?”

Alas, the reward for a job well done is more jobs to be done. Besides, “What have you done for me lately?”
We carry over this same type of thinking into our personal lives. We expect our personal growth and all of life’s opportunities to be linear, or worse to hockey stick towards abundance.

Unfortunately, from time to time, we fall short of our (own?) expectations. We tell ourselves we didn’t work hard enough or we should have done this or should have done that. We listen too much to outside opinion.
We do not leave room for “good” but will only accept great.

Instead, why can’t we learn from mistakes, capitalize on what we did well, move on, and try again? We like to dwell on what went wrong, worry about things that haven’t happened yet, and tell ourselves stories about why we’ll fail again. Sometimes we don’t even “fail”, we just don’t win as big as we thought we would.

The other side of failure isn’t success, it’s effort. It’s the willingness to try again, despite not performing our absolute best the first time. It’s putting our (bruised) ego aside and leading with the confidence that we’ll get it right this time.

The other side of failure is growth.

Today is the best day ever if you make it so.