If you look for “failure quotes” on google, you may found some inspiring ones:

“Success consist on going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm”

“Success is the result of perfection, hard work, learning from failure to failure”

“Failure is success in progress”… and it is, right?… RIGHT?!

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Well… Kind of, but not always?

Failure can be a scary concept, and often, the only time it’s accepted is if it’s turned into a dragon that eventually gets slain by the hero, success. Because it’s scary, because it’s embarrassing and something we want to distance ourselves from, turning failure into a villain is an unavoidable requirement in our glorious ascension to success.

These stories give us inspiration, they give us courage, and they encourage us to become the next Steve Jobs, the new Oprah, or just a better version of ourselves.

But honestly, those stories aren’t emulatable. Those stories are created under a bunch of different variables – race, gender, economic support, and a whole slew of other factors and privileges. They’re just one story against an entire universe of attempts and efforts.

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It’s great to be optimistic, it’s great to dream, but unrealistic expectations tend to spoil our view of reality. Telling only these stories where that dastardly villain failure was eventually defeated and everyone rode off into the sunset  increases the negative impact of failure and shame in our lives (and in some cases, that’s all that’s needed to make someone give up and never try again)

So why bother then? If success is not the light at the end of the tunnel, what is it?

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Don’t worry, we haven’t become Fuckup Nihilists.

There is something there, and it’s resiliency. It’s the moving forward attitude, the journey, the knowledge, the tunnel itself that will make you grow – and not the light at the end of it.

Life tends to be unfair. And we need to be reassured. So when we encounter hardships and inconveniences in life, we have the need to feel like it’s worth something, that all of this will pay off someday. But, we should be conscious that failure may or may not lead us to success, and we need to re-frame and re-define what failure is.

Failure will happen. No one can actually know what will happen with every attempt that you make – so what are you gonna do about it?

We say, let’s get out, fail, try again, and repeat – and let’s find out what happens together.

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