I read this sentence today and stopped to ponder its meaning a while. If someone says I failed, that means I failed to do something. But it doesn’t mean I am a failure.
Failed is an action or failed action or wrong action or inaction. It is something you do or as Yoda from Star Wars says do or do not. Failed is a momentary state, and once that moment passes it no longer applies.
Failure is a noun, usually used to describe a person or a thing like a tool, which repeatedly fails to complete its task. This introduces us to another word, repeatedly. What does repeatedly mean? It means again and again, without failure. So in order to fit the definition of failure we would have to repeatedly fail, again and again at everything we do.
But if we are able to do something repeatedly, again and again, without failure, have we not succeeded in doing something repeatedly? And if we were successful at doing it repeatedly, does that mean we are successful?
Your probably thinking that my line of reasoning doesn’t make sense. It’s silly to think of someone who fails repeatedly, as a success. If you feel this way your right. The statement that someone who fails repeatedly is successful at failing is illogical because failure isn’t success no matter how many times you do it successfully, because failing by definition isn’t success.
The same holds for calling someone a failure. To be a failure you have to fail repeatedly, at everything you do, again and again. Notice there is no magic number of failures. You just have to fail at everything you do.
Why is this important? Because everything you do means, as long as you are doing something you haven’t failed at yet, you haven’t failed at everything you do and your not a failure.
Put another way, if you try one hundred things and fail, if your willing to try something else you still haven’t failed everything and your not a failure. However, if you try one thing and fail, then decide to never try anything else, you have failed everything you tried and you are a failure.
So the moral of the story is, is your failure, your singular try that now defines you as a noun; a failure? Or is it a verb, an action, a momentary state of being, but that moment passed. And you the non-failure are trying again.
Personally, I think my life is full of verbs, or actions and the main verb is do.
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Thank you.
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Hi! @shortsegments very good reading, I would like to share my opinion about it, I think that life is a coming and going of experiences and it is only about learning, necessarily the first time we will not get everything right, so I consider that failure, when I decide to give up and not continue trying, that's why I am here again, in Steemit, struggling to learn from you and from your particular way of explaining things from your experience and points of view, sometimes, it's just just a learning -process, and between being and not to be we are, that's why as the song says we must be non-substantive verbs
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