Part of the journey: failure

The topic for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday is about the journey. Wendy Pastrick’s choice (I’m hosting again next month!).

There are a lot of journeys. There are some that just keep going, and others that seem to finish (some in success; some in failure). Of course, many of the ones that finish end up being the start of new journeys, but sometimes they don’t need to continue – they just need closure. There are things that can be learned regardless of how things went, whether or not goals were reached, and whether or not there was failure.

There’s been a few things recently to remind me of this…

I visited a company recently who has put a video together promoting the idea of failure. It wasn’t asking that people fail, but said “Go ahead and fail,” because failure happens. They had been through a rough time, but were persisting and seeing things turn around.

Just the other night, we saw the musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (you probably know the movie – the Bond film where Dick van Dyke stars as the guy with the gadget-car, who takes on Goldfinger and falls for the girl with the inappropriate name). Anyway, there’s a brilliant song in that called “The Roses of Success” (YouTube link there). It has the same sentiment – “…from the ashes of disaster grow the roses of success!”

A few years ago, my kids started saying “FAIL!” when someone did something wrong. I can’t say I liked the insult. Far worse would’ve been “DIDN’T TRY!” It would be very easy to just stay in bed and ‘avoid failure’ that way, but anyone who fails has at least done something. To fail, you must at least be active.

I talk to a lot of people about Microsoft Certification, particularly people who have failed an exam. I tell everyone (not just those who have failed before) to try the exams before they feel they’re ready for them, . What’s the worst that can happen? Worst case, they don’t pass. But how is that a bad thing? It might feel less than brilliant (I know, it’s happened to me before), but it gives an opportunity to target the weak areas before having a subsequent attempt. It doesn’t matter how many attempts it takes to get a passing score – the wrong option would be to give up. Studying can be excellent, but not to the point of causing extra stress.

There are things in life we do easily, and there are things that we struggle with. I know there’s a bunch of stuff in my own life that falls into both categories. I don’t want this post to be a list of the things that I’m not doing well – I simply want to point out that I want to keep trying.

With God’s help, I can improve in the areas in which I’m not excelling, and start to smell the roses of success.