You spend more time with your own failures than anyone else on Earth. Eventually, you might internalize them and come to fear failure. However, for everyone else, they barely know your failures even exist.
Photo by Emertz76.
As personal finance site Four Pillar Freedom points out, many of the failures you internalise are completely invisible to everyone else. If you apply to a hundred jobs but only get one, most people only see you getting a job. You’re the only one who sees the hundred rejections. Sure, they might not feel great, but no one else is holding them against you:
So what does this mean? It means that no one on earth is aware of all the failures you have experienced (nor do they probably care to know). So if you feel like you are a ‘failure’ just know that you are solely responsible for giving yourself that label. Nobody else can label you as a failure. Only you can label yourself as one since only you are aware of how many times you have actually failed.
Of course, sometimes you’ll screw up in a public way that people can see. None of us can hide all of our faults. However, you’re not as much of a failure as you might think. Most people experience those same rejections. You just don’t see theirs and, naturally, they don’t see yours.
You Are the Only Person Tracking Your Failures [Four Pillar Freedom via Rockstar Finance]
Comments
One response to “Don’t Hold Your Failures Against Yourself, Most People Don’t Even See Them”
Then there is the opposite of this approach. There are actually some folks in the workplace who are abject failures, but don’t see themselves as such. Every thing they touch turns to poo, yet they continue on their way through life totally oblivious to the chaos they’re causing.
And of course they’re never to blame; it’s always someone else’s fault. All one can do here is hope they get a transfer (so others can suffer), or more usually in the Public Service, they get promoted to a position where they do less harm (and yes, I’ve seen this happen).