How watching my nephew try to crawl taught me a lesson on failure…

My nephew is just days away from having his 8 month birthday. And, I’ve noticed that in the last month or so, he’s been trying so hard to crawl. For whatever reason, he always goes for the iphone or ipad. (kids these days!) But, no matter how hard he tries, he seems to constantly fall over. Sometimes he cries, other times he just lays there until my sister picks him up and repositions him. But, oddly enough, he keeps trying. And, every time he falls, my sister looks at him and says, “It’s ok boo boo. It doesn’t matter how many times you fall, it’s about how many times you get back up.”

I can’t speak for everyone else, but that simple statement is something that I seem to forget on a daily basis. When we become fixated on our failures, we stop. We stop trying, we stop learning, and we stop moving forward. We become controlled by worst case scenarious that exist only in our mind. But my nephew doesn’t know that maybe he’s not strong enough to crawl yet. Or that he doesn’t have the necessary balance to crawl yet. So he keeps trying. His adolescent “unawareness” is his greatest asset.

Instead of focusing on why we can’t do something, we should focus on how we can accomplish it. And when we get off track, we should pause, acknowledge our misstep, and correct course accordingly. Two quotes perfectly sum up my thoughts on “persistence” and “failure.”

“Some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all — in which case, you fail by default.” — J.K. Rowling

“Aerodynamically, the bumble bee shouldn’t be able to fly, but the bumble bee doesn’t know it so it goes on flying anyway.” — Mary Kay Ash