One 40-something woman’s message to 20-somethings on embracing failure.
“Fail a lot in your twenties. I read a book in my twenties that was about not being afraid to fail and I never was. I came from a small town in Pennsylvania and I got an internship at MTV in New York. There were all these kids from NYU and Columbia. It was intimidating and it could have made me feel like a failure right from the start. But it made me strong. I didn’t have the same advantages maybe, but they put me at the table with these kids so I just said, “Okay, I’m going to have to learn. I just had to be open to learning and failing. Its resilience. It’s not wrong to fail. As Americans, I think we’re built not to fail. That makes no sense to me. Lincoln ran for office for 17 times. He failed every time but he finally got what he wanted.
Fail, fail, fail. Trust me. I laid the blame on myself so many times over failing but then you just get up. It just sounds so trite to say it but you just keep getting up and doing it over and over again and that is success. You get your confidence through failure.
Even in relationships, it’s really about how you react to those failures. I think another thing I would say to twenty –somethings is to not to be so hard on yourself when you choose a bad partner or a bad friend. You sit there thinking, “Oh my gosh! How could I let that person into my life? How could I have not been a better judge of character?” Again, that’s just failure. Move on. Not that you don’t look back. It is about looking back and learning from those lessons.” – 40-something, failed, learned, lived in NYC, LA, and PA, married, consultant/business owner, describes her 40-something life as “idyllic”
on Twitter
on Facebook
on Google+