Saturday, August 4, 2012

Failure is Awesome: Projects

I love my failures!

No, really.  I do.

For once, that sentence hasn't been said in an attempt to be sarcastic or funny.  Failure is truly awesome.

You probably think I'm crazy.  I can understand that.  Nobody wants to fail at anything, after all.  The thing is, if you spend your life only succeeding, is there any real growth happening?  I don't think so.

Falling on your face causes you to not only pick yourself up to greater heights, but forces you to notice the crack in the trail that enabled the misstep to occur.  The flaw in the groundwork.

I come across a lot of cracks. 


Take, for instance, the time that I decided to boil together some leftover tomato sauce and a bit of water in an attempt to create dye for a few of my stained cloth napkins.  In an attempt to make the table napkins look better, I ended up simply producing more stains.


Totally ugly, and totally not what I had in mind.

My initial response, of course, was to squinch up my nose in disgust.  Later, however, I started to consider why it happened.  I learned about proper ways to set the dye, and I discovered that irregularities in the mixture would result in a color that was not uniform, by any stretch of the imagination.

Basically, that failure resulted in a successful learning process.  

Had I not ended up with such a laughable product, I would have simply patted myself on the back and never learned the reason behind the success.  Failure, therefore, enabled me to have a deeper understanding of the dye process.

This, in turn, led me to successfully produce  my own dye for the environmentally responsible cascarones I made for our Easter morning fun.


Failure isn't just inevitable, it's a wonderful part of the learning process, but this is a difficult concept to grasp.

We don't like to fail.

I don't like to fail.

Yet, without failure, there is no true success.  Failure, therefore, is truly an awesome part of life.

Today I gave an example of project failure.  I was planning on more, but... wow.  I wrote a lot.  The post ended up having to be divided into two parts.

Yikes!

Stay tuned!  Tomorrow I'll be talking about my black walnut trees.

And remember...

It's ok to fail... even awesome!


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