One of the universal things out there is failure. I don’t know any person that has not failed at something.
Failure is a right of passage; a way to gain experience and grow in wisdom. Not everything goes right the first time because we just don’t know enough to make it go right.
Some people see failure as a flaw. To me, it doesn’t matter how many times you have failed if you get back up and continue onwards. You might have scars from your failures, but that does not mean they have to define you for the rest of your life.
Everyone has skeletons in their closet; nobody talks about everything in their life. People may not know all your failures, but you can still learn from them, and have them shape you into a more awesome person.
Get up. Pick yourself up off the floor. Because you are a warrior, and warriors continue on towards the end.
My home study/office is littered with artwork all over
the walls. I look up from my computer and get inspired by art, quotes, and
posters. I let my mind wander a little looking at all the abstract, a brief
respite from work.
Then it’s back to work.
In my classroom I don’t have a lot of personalized
stuff, but what I do have are rituals. In the mornings, I gather my notes for
the day, check my emails, and get ready for my incoming classes. At lunch I
take a moment to check out for a few minutes, recover some of my energy, and
plow through the rest of the day. After my day classes end, I enjoy a diet Dr.
Pepper—my first for the day, and for some reason, tastes like chocolate. It
instantly relaxes me.
Then, on some days, it’s off to teach some of my
college classes for the evening.
Having these small mini breaks and rituals keep me going
and help me to not wear down as much. A small recovery to gather my thoughts,
get mentally ready for what’s coming, and then march forward.
What do you do to get you through the day? What are
your rituals that keep you going?
Best ritual of the day for me: hitting my bed at night
and catching some z’s.
I keep putting off writing my update on my big project. Remember that post when I was frustrated and wanted my next experiment to work? Well, it didn’t. And the next one didn’t. And then the one after that failed too.
But you know what? Rather than get discouraged enough
to quit, alternative ideas kept coming to me: what if I tweaked it this way?
What if I did this differently? Or even a completely new approach would form in
my thoughts. I have an experiment coming up that is a completely different take
on an old concept.
I love that feeling—the feeling of hope in a new
approach. The feeling that even though my experiment failed, it is not the end.
When I first started down the inventing trail, like
all young inventors presumably, I took it really hard when my experiments
failed. It felt like the end of the world. I cried a lot. Then after a few failures,
my attitude shifted and I started to see each failure not as the end, but as
information about how not to do it.
There are two main ways people take failure: it either
makes a person feel so down that they decide to hang up the
idea/project/relationship/etc., or they see it as a way to not do it and try a
different strategy.
Is everything doable? No, but the doesn’t mean you
can’t try. Who knows—you might find a solution everyone missed.
Have you tried a different approach to something lately?
Also, offering the short horror story Toilet Paper went over so overwhelmingly well that I’ve decided to keep it a free download for now. Feel free to enjoy anytime, and check out my other stories!
I think failure haunts everyone. It defines us; it
shapes our lives; it makes us better. Some people look at failure as a
roadblock, a stop sign to not go down that path anymore.
I like to think of failure as an obstacle on an
obstacle course. If you get through one, there are more to follow, a path of
falling and rising in between. But at the end, if you keep going, is success.
Maybe not like a million dollars success, but
something you have achieved and is worthwhile, and could possibly lead to
million dollar success in the future.
Don’t ever listen to people who tell you that you are
a failure. You are not a failure. You will succeed eventually. Just because
someone says you are stupid to pursue that idea or that goal doesn’t mean it is
true.
Get up. Fight back. Succeed. Show those people that
you will accomplish something worthwhile, and you will win in the end. Just
like with running, you could be the slowest person in the world, but you are
still lapping everyone on the couch.
I am just so frustrated. I want my experiments to work, but the majority fail. Yes, my Teazzed straw is awesome, but the project I have spent a little more than 4 years on still doesn’t work. I have a notebook filled with ideas and strategies on how to best approach my idea, but always I fail. It’s like I am stuck in a loop that seems never ending.
Of course, as the saying goes, it took Edison over a
thousand times to invent the lightbulb. This struggle is nothing new to
inventors—it’s just so incredibly frustrating.
I have an experiment lined up this weekend. As much as I
hope for it to work, as much as I wish for it to succeed, it might not. For the
past year I have been sure that the latest experiment will work, but always I
am disappointed. I do learn a lot from the failures, and am still pressing
onward with new information each time, so you could call it progress.
I just wonder sometimes if it will ever work. Like the ant
that dreams of growing up to be a giant, but will never see fruition. Sometimes
I wonder if it will all be worth it someday.
Did you know that when you look at something, what your eyes
really capture is equivalent to the jerky, unstable images of a handheld
camera?
So why is it that we see so clearly? Because our brain
compiles those jerky images from our eyes moving around and stitches them all
together to make one cohesive picture, like movie frames.
Even what your eyes capture isn’t the full view—there are
gaps in the images—like pictures with smudges or holes. You brain fixes this
too—it takes in information from the surrounding images and fills in those
gaps.
All of this happens so fast, that the majority of people are
not aware of it, and the brain spits out a visual interpretation of what the
eyes see so we can understand and respond to our environment accordingly.
But sometimes, the brain is too smart for its own good. It
will fill in those gaps with what is supposed to be there, not what is
necessarily there in reality. The educated guess only goes so far, especially
if the brain is under stress.
A great example: Last week I made some changes to my website
and posted about it with a butterfly picture. I made the picture late at night,
on a day where I had worked some long hours, and I was very tired.
Now, usually, I work on my posts and pictures over the weekend, when I am refreshed and relaxed. But since I had spent the majority of my early and late hours after work last week on my website, I decided to go for an impromptu post, #26.
Everything was going smoothly, except this happened:
I was typing, “Change is in the air.” That’s what I thought I had typed, and what I had thought I read when I proofread it. But my brain, my awesome tired brain, interpreted what my eyes saw, in all their jerky, holey glory, that one of those “in’s” was in fact an “is”. Picture goes up, gets posted on social media, and I happen to look at it several hours later, and notice my mistake.
Moral of the story: your brain is awesome and makes you
unique, but sometimes it needs to be rested in order to perform better. I might
have caught the mistake had I been more refreshed, but alas, that is the nature
of working all the time.
I’m going to add something new to my blog: quote
dissections. As you are already aware of, I like to use quotes, and sometimes a
few words can have powerful meanings.
So I am going to dissect them.
Today’s quote rings true with a lot of things. We live
in a society where people are judged by the first appearance, the first
handshake; that instant moment where you are superficially sized up.
Not everyone who has a weak handshake is a pushover.
Not everyone who seems distracted isn’t on the ball.
And not everything deemed impossible is actually
impossible.
Waaaay back in the day, people might have not imagined
that everyone would have access to a computer, whether desktop, laptop, tablet,
or cell phone, or even a smart watch. Now, computers are everywhere.
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in the day,
people might have not thought there was anything better than a candle for
light. Then along came some great discoveries and inventions, and now, whola!,
you can flip a switch and light up a whole room.
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay
back in the day, people dreamed of a way to transport heavy materials, or just
anything really, without the slow trudge of dragging it on the ground. Then one
day, someone invented the wheel, and we’ve been building off that awesome idea
for quite some time now.
People think something is impossible because they
don’t have the solution; they can’t see the answer.
Some people dare to conceive an answer, and bring it
to life, to change the way society perceives something, even if it is just a
better way to make a product.
Here’s to the dreamers: to them impossible is just a word
and has no bearing on reality.
That new invention idea I’ve been working on quietly
in the background, the one with the headphones, has failed yet again. I’m
pretty sure my theory is sound, I just need a good way to implement it. It’s a
pretty cool idea that could be super beneficial, if it would just stop not
working (said every inventor ever). One day it will work, and then everything
will be awesome for a couple hours, before another obstacle rears its head.
For Teazzed, I’d been putting it on the backburner lately, because I was getting my book finalized. But I recently got back to it and redid the website and am gearing up to do some marketing. It is so cool to be able to make tea brewed to completion in about 30 seconds. I take my straw a lot of places, and especially on trips, so I don’t have to worry about making tea the old-fashioned way. Feel free to mosey on over and check out the new design: http://www.Teazzed.com
Photo by Danielle Macinnes; Quote by C. J. Cherryh
When I was doing freelance writing more often, I came
across some bad writers. People actually sent me stuff that looked like it went
through a grammar shredding machine. Those projects took a lot longer to polish
and get back on track.
Some people had better grammar and sentence structure
skills, and I could put together their stuff—editing, resumes, etc.—in a much
shorter time frame.
Some people are better at business too. I would love
to tell you I am a business master, but truth is, there are people out there
that are better and have been doing it longer. But with the right research,
learning, and polishing, hopefully I will be one of those people someday.
If your just starting pursuing something, or aren’t hitting the six figures you thought you would, don’t fret too much just yet. Keep polishing, keep learning, and hopefully you’ll land where you want too.
I know nothing about cars. I am not as bad as the
chick who splashes oil onto the engine to “put oil in the car,” but I can’t
tell you how to fix a car. I can help you change a tire, but that’s about it.
My husband, on the other hand, knows tons of stuff about cars, and how to fix them. He does most of the maintenance work for our vehicles, and people even call him for advice on their cars. Did I mention he is badass at fixing cars?
Everyone has their forte—most people aren’t good at everything. Find your niche and run with it—build off your strengths.
I am a tea fanatic. I drink a lot of tea daily, and I have gotten into blending my own flavors (that hopefully one day I will sell on Teazzed). I wanted brewed tea instantly and in bottles that I could reuse over and over throughout the day, so I invented something to fill my need. I combined my love of tea with my love for inventing and ran with it. The business is still a work in progress, but I am having fun with the process.
I also like writing, which is one of the reasons I started this blog. It’s still going well, I think, and hopefully it will continue on.
Have fun with whatever you decide to pursue. Make the journey just as fun as seeing the end result.
