Aug 6, 2008

Epic Fail!!!!



Everything I’ve ever accomplished in life has come from the result of some failure. For example, I found Crossfit because I hurt myself running and couldn’t really workout for a while. I was miserable and depressed. My knee was hurting so bad that I didn’t even want to get out of bed, let alone do anything athletic. I would go to the gym, wander around, and leave in a pretty terrible mood because everything I tried just made things worse. I remember one day going to the gym, and looking at these 2 rowers off in the corner of the gym that I always wondered why they were actually there. But I said what the hell, and I found I could get on one of them, row, and it didn’t bother my knee. Problem was they weren’t very useful for me as I felt that they weren’t really working anything. But I always heard how great they were. So off to the internet I went, looking for advice on how to row properly. Up came this weird little site called Crossfit. The rest, as they say is history.

Failure is one of the greatest motivators of men. Usually, the initial reaction to failure is to blame everything but the person staring back at us in the mirror. But the thing is, if we put the blame on something else, there is nothing left for us to do to correct the problem. We cannot change other people or those events that we have no control over. It is up to us to take responsibilities for our lives and actions, and make changes in ourselves. Once we assume that responsibility, then we can look hard at what it is that failed, and hopefully make the corrections needed to change that disappointment into something different. This is how we succeed by failing.

In his “Last Lecture”, Randy Paush said that brick walls are there to let us prove how badly we want something. Failure is one of these brick walls. It can be discouraging, it makes us feel bad, but it also makes us look inwards to ask ourselves, “Do we want this?” Failure is the great equalizer. It separates the weak from the strong. The weak are those who will give up, and bow out first. The strong will remain standing, trying to do what it takes to continue to overcome whether it’s the first, fifth, or hundredth time they have attempted something.