Motivation Monday: Run Toward Failure

Nobody likes to fail.

That is not a controversial statement. Failure hurts. It feels personal even when it is not. It is embarrassing and frustrating and sometimes genuinely devastating.

But here is what I have learned after a lifetime of getting knocked down and getting back up.

The most successful people I know of did not avoid failure. They ran toward it.

And that changed everything about how I think about losing.

The Rejection That Stung the Most

In my sophomore year of college I applied to the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. I had been working toward it for two years. Good grades, hard work, all of it pointed in that direction.

The automatic admission standard was a 3.5 GPA.

I had a 3.48.

They said no.

Two hundredths of a grade point. That was the margin. And they did not let me know until the end of June, which gave me about six weeks to figure out what plan B was. I did not really have a plan B.

I had to call people and tell them. Friends, family, people who had been rooting for me. Every time I had to break the news it felt like the rejection was happening all over again. Each conversation was its own fresh sting.

It was crushing. And it was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

What Failure Actually Teaches You

Success teaches you that you are capable of great things. That is valuable.

But failure is a tougher teacher. And the lessons stick differently.

When you fail, if you are willing to look at it honestly, it shows you exactly where the gap was. Where you did not invest enough time or energy. What you could have done differently. What you need to work on before you try again.

That is not comfortable information. Nobody wants to sit with the negative things about themselves. I know I have a lot of good qualities, but I also have real flaws. Self doubt. Anxiety. A pessimism that creeps in when things get hard. I am aware of those things. I own them. And I try not to let them drive my decisions.

Failure forced me to see those things clearly in a way that success never would have.

There is a Rocky line I keep coming back to. It is not about how hard you can hit. It is about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.

That is what failure tests. Not your talent. Not your intelligence. Your willingness to keep moving.

The Chip on Your Shoulder

Getting rejected from something you worked hard for puts a chip on your shoulder.

That chip can go one of two ways.

It can make you bitter. Resentful. The kind of person who lets a failure become their whole identity. Who stops trying because they are afraid of feeling that way again.

Or it can become fuel.

When that rejection came, I had a choice. I could let it define me or I could use it. The same is true of every hard thing that has happened in my life. I have sat with enough pain and frustration at this point to know that you can either let it sit there and rot or you can turn it into something.

The measure of a person is being able to take the pain and suffering and use it to create something good.

Think about the writers who came out of World War One. Hemingway. Fitzgerald. The Lost Generation. They experienced one of the worst things humans have ever done to each other. And some of them turned that experience into literature that is still read and talked about a hundred years later.

That is not a justification for the suffering. It is just proof of what human beings can do with it when they choose to.

Learning From Failure vs Obsessing Over It

There is a difference between the two and it is worth naming.

Learning from failure means being willing to look at a painful experience as objectively as you can. To ask what happened, why it happened, and what you would do differently. It is not easy. But it is productive.

Obsessing over failure is something else. It is replaying the loss over and over without extracting anything useful from it. It is letting the fear of failing again stop you from trying at all.

The goal is not to avoid thinking about failure. The goal is to think about it like a scientist. To hold it up and examine it and take from it what is actually useful, and leave the shame and the self judgment on the floor where it belongs.

What I Would Tell Someone Right in the Middle of It

If you just experienced a significant failure and you are right in the middle of the pain of it, here is what I want to say to you.

Unless it killed you, it is not the end.

And if it did, I would genuinely love to know how you are reading this article.

But seriously. I am not going to tell you to jump right back on the horse this second. Feel what you feel. That is allowed.

What I will say is this. It is only over when you decide it is over. One failure, even a significant one, is not the final word on what you are capable of. It is just information.

Run Toward It

Here is the thing nobody tells you about chasing a dream.

Failure is not a possibility on the path to success. It is a certainty.

There is no version of chasing something worth chasing where you do not stumble along the way. There is no path to where you want to go that does not run straight through some version of failure.

So the question is not how to avoid it. The question is what you do with it when it comes.

I want people who follow this brand to shoot for their dreams. Really go for it. And I also want them to know that when they fail, because they will, it is not a sign they were wrong to try. It is just the next lesson on the way to where they are going.

Failure is not the enemy. It is just a tool that shows you more ways to succeed.

The most successful people did not avoid failure. They ran toward it. They collected the lessons, dusted themselves off, and went again with more information than they had before.

If Bait Dogs went out of business tomorrow it would hurt. A lot. But the next time I started something I would be leagues ahead of where I was when I started this.

That is what failure does when you let it teach you instead of define you.

No one who has ever succeeded did so without failing.

Now go fail at something worth failing at.

We are the underdogs. We don't stay down, we bite back.