I believe that failure happens when we totally give up on our goal. There comes a time, while shooting for success where we hit a point of stagnation and we stop progressing. It may seem at that point that we have failed and sometimes we put the goal off for a while.

I believe you made a great point when you asked the question, “if you fail and learn something from it … is it truly a failure anymore?”

I believe we can take the lessons we learned from our failures and rebirth them into success. The same thing happened to me a couple years ago, and I won’t go deep into that story or my comment will turn into a blog post on a blog post…LOL, Great post and keep up the great work!

I’m going to go on a tangent here. I’d venture to say that what we appreciate about failure is really something different all together. We just put the ‘failure’ label on it. As you know, anything that’s difficult to get has more value and people would want to invest more to get it. There’s a concept in economics about sunk cost. Whatever you put in, time/money/effort, is gone and you can’t get it back… therefore, it *shouldn’t* influence your future decisions. I understand it’s extreme and it isn’t always responsible NOT to consider sunk costs. However, I believe the feeling of failure comes in because people are attached to high sunk costs of obtaining something difficult (to them, anyway) to achieve. For example, I was reading this today: http://www.ratracetrap.com/the-rat-race-trap/the-sunk-cost-bias-mind-trap.html

I wrote a comment using the government and its handling of Medicare. Obviously Medicare is going bankrupt. And yet people keep clinging on to it because we’ve invested so much money and time into; if we let it go, it would be considered a failure just because of that. In this case, believing that Medicare would be a failure if we let go is a barrier to change. If we don’t see it as a failure, if we don’t simply see it as a sum of all the time and money invested in it, it would be much easier to learn from it and move on to something better.

I think failure does exist. Moreover, I think it is necessary. Failure serves as a motivator and an existential lesson to correct or modify our behavior. It is the pitfall we try to avoid in the hopes of staying on our intended path of purpose and ultimately achieving what we were put here to do. If there was no such thing as failure, what would be the incentive for change?

That said, I am completely onboard with you that failure does not mean the end of the world. We absolutely must change failure into success lest we get mired in the obstacles and lose sight of the joy of the journey. While attempting to avoid it can be fruitful, so is the fact that we can not avoid it entirely. The two coupled give us teach us about courage, faith, wisdom, and perseverance in such a way as to make our lives purposeful and rewarding.
ForNot´s last blog ..Jam On It

It reminds me of Wooden. His point was to play your best. If you played your worst, but won, did you really win … and if you played, but lost, did you really lose?

I think the keys to always succeeding are giving your best, turning failure into feedback, and following your growth.
J.D. Meier´s last blog ..Information Overload is Not the Problem – It’s Filter Failure

Finally, I’ll echo what you said at the end – don’t compare yourself to others – I’ve done this before in the past. It becomes frustrating because you can never be somebody else. Everyone’s path is different.