“Failure runs parallel to letting your guard down.” – Eric Longenhagen & Kiley McDaniel, Future Value

No matter how hard you try to prevent it, failure will happen in your life. It’s an unavoidable part of being human, especially when you have your guard down. Sometimes you think it’s safe to relax and let your guard down. But that’s exactly when you need to be on high alert and ready to deal with whatever comes your way.

We all have those moments when we stop paying attention to our surroundings and take the proverbial foot off the gas pedal of our routine, allowing ourselves to get comfortable in our daily lives. While letting your guard down might seem like an easy way to allow yourself to unwind and recharge, it actually presents many more perils than simply being caught off guard by something you didn’t see coming. When you start believing that you’re invincible, failure becomes inevitable because you cease to prepare yourself properly.

In the age of social media, there seems to be an unwritten rule that we must always put our best foot forward. Our feeds are chock-full of only positive moments in time, as if to say that it’s okay to fail when no one else is around to see it—that failure is not an option, because we don’t really fail unless other people know about it. This may be true, but that doesn’t mean failing isn’t an inevitable part of life and the human experience.

The opposite of success is not failure, it’s mediocrity. There’s the old saying that success is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration, although those percentages are quite exaggerated. It’s truer that mediocrity has these same margins. That’s because on its own, 99% perspiration gets you nowhere. Putting in long hours and working hard doesn’t mean much if you don’t work smart, too.

The biggest reason we often give in to failure is that we believe it’s often a result of one or more personal shortcomings. Sometimes, our failures can be the result of simply not giving enough effort. But, perhaps the biggest key to learning from failure is recognizing which ideas are doomed to fail; some things always will work better in theory than in practice. Those that don’t want to risk failure should make sure they understand why others have failed, then learn what they can do differently to avoid those same missteps.

By embracing your failures and keeping them in perspective, you can use those experiences to fuel positive changes without getting bogged down by self-defeating regret. As Thomas Edison, who invented light bulbs and recorded sound on plastic discs once famously said: “I have not failed 10,000 times. I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”

~ Amelia Desertsong