This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why can’t I just accept failure? Like if I fail on something I always almost grandiosly believe that there is no way that’s the end and begin comming up with a whole palet of things to do that could potentialy “fix the situation”?”

Instead of asking why you can’t accept failure, you should ask whether failure is acceptable within specific contexts. You should also ask yourself what you might learn from what you perceive as a failure, which also begs the question of why you perceive a specific outcome as a failure.

For example, if you’re interested in someone and wish to develop an intimate relationship with them, and your advances are met with rejection, do you perceive that as a failure? If you perceive that as a failure, does that motivate you to persist in your advances, hoping you can convince them to change their mind?

Suppose your approach is to persist in pursuing a relationship after being rejected because you can’t accept what you perceive as a failure. In that case, you are failing to understand the dynamic in play.

Lack of success in achieving a goal does not equal failure.

Being rejected by someone else isn’t a situation you can fix.

Let’s move on to a different context commonly associated with a perception of failure, such as not achieving the goal of becoming a millionaire. The paths one can take to achieve such a goal are innumerable, while the variables affecting the outcomes are more easily quantifiable. For example, elements in achieving this goal amount to the degree of opportunity extant within a particular strategy, the material resources one has on hand to help them achieve their goal, their interpersonal relationships and the successes and advantages one may gain through their networking efforts, timing, market reception and demand for their product or service, their competitive difference, the uniqueness of their offering, the quality of their branding, and how they can leverage media to maintain a top of mind that contributes toward steady growth.

These combined can almost be a prescription for guaranteeing one can become a millionaire in time. However, any single tragedy or traumatic life-altering event in their lives can derail all of that.

Failing to achieve their goal of becoming a millionaire doesn’t mean they have failed because it’s impossible to predict random events in one’s life that can dramatically alter its trajectory.

In this case, to contrast against the former example, one can return to pursuing their original goal of becoming a millionaire while being entirely hobbled in all the areas one initially relied on to achieve their success at the outset of working toward their goal. What can happen at a point where one realizes their goal is not only much more difficult, if not impossible, to attain after so much had been lost, is that their initial goal is no longer as important as it once was, or at least no longer defined by the same parameters or reasoning one applied at the outset. Instead of becoming a millionaire, they adjust their goal to a more modest level of meeting needs and fulfilling some desires while realizing how some choices they made the first time are no longer acceptable.

The nature of their goal will have changed in ways that make its first interpretation moot.

That process is called learning — growing as an individual and adapting to a reality that one has a limited capacity for influencing.

One hasn’t failed if they can succeed in adapting to new circumstances. Quite frankly, the opposite is true in such a case because such tragedies often result in even worse tragedies from being unable to cope with traumatic losses. People frequently commit suicide when faced with intense trauma that destroys what they had accustomed themselves to accept as true about their lives.

The point is to help you understand the genesis of failure lies within one’s perceptions. If you struggle intensely against what you perceive as a failure, you fail to understand your circumstances’ deeper level.

IOW, your perception of failure is a failure to restrain your ego because it assumes you have complete control over outcomes when you don’t.

Sometimes, “failure” is failing to accept failing to achieve a goal. Failing to achieve a goal is an opportunity to learn something about reality and oneself. If people can walk away to continue living their lives while learning something they did not understand before their experience of failure, then they haven’t failed at all.

The point of life is learning, not achieving.

Temet Nosce