In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer
— Albert Camus —
Failure is a word that nobody wants to hear. Failure can cause us to cry… have heart palpitations… question God…. rethink our whole lives. An experience no one wants to have. I mean, who sets out to fail? Who starts an experience, a project or a relationship with the express goal of not being successful? No one! No one starts a job and imagines that they will not meet the expectations of their organization or supervisor. We are built to believe that if we are in it, then we will be a winner. There is nothing wrong with or unreasonable about thinking that way. It’s natural.
If there is an upside to failure, I would say that upside would be that it can also set us up for the greatest time we could have ever thought of in our wildest dreams. Instead of wallowing in the negativity of it, we have to find the lesson in it. I fully understand that there is the initial shock/hurt/drama/loss that goes with failure so I am not expecting you to smile as you are watching everything that you worked for go down the drain. What I am saying, though, is that there is a lesson in EVERYTHING. The lesson won’t always feel good. It may not always be pretty. It may even be the worst thing that ever happened to you in your whole life. But I believe that what looks like failure to your natural eyes could be success veiled. Everything isn't going to look the way you think it should. That doesn't make it failure. It just makes it different. Find the difference.