I was watching the Big Bang Theory show the other night with my son. In the show Sheldon has failed at developing a new theory. He is devastated and has given up. Sheldon watches a video of his father who giving a pep talk to his football team who is losing the game. Sheldon’s father says “the team might lose the game but it doesn’t make any of them losers.”
Sheldon’s father continues by saying that “you can learn more from losing than from winning.”
I look back at all the failures in my life and realize how much I had learned from them. Why do we continue to strive to be perfect and trying to protect ourselves from failure? Are we actually limiting our learning opportunities by avoiding failure? I believe it’s not about the failure, but what we do after the failure at counts. It’s all about resiliency and coming back from the failure. I agree with Sheldon’s father who says at the end of his pep talk that “when we fail, we have a choice. We can give up or we can go out and give ‘em hell.”
We need to pick ourselves up, which is hard, but it’s doable and go out and “give ’em hell”. We deserve to live our best lives and this means picking ourselves up off the floor when we fail and keep going no matter how hard this is. We just need to remember that through this experience we are learning and failure does define us. We define ourselves.