Daily Inspiration: Personal Growth – “Take pride in your losses because they teach you about your wins!”

“Take pride in your losses because they teach you about your wins!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

People hide from their failure.

They shouldn’t.

Because often, it’s the only way to get to success.

Your wins are informed by your losses. Your success is defined by your failure. Moving forward always comes after a few steps back. Achieving your goals always comes after your missteps in trying to achieve them. You’ll always do worse before you do better.

This attitude has always informed everything I do. When I learned to ski late in life, success only came after some spectacularly bad moments. Learning to golf involved regularly going into the water before I managed to get over it fairly consistently. Learning Linux on my own involved blowing up a lot of well-functioning computer systems until I learned how not to.

You might have seen in the last few weeks a few notes apologizing in case I sent a few duplicates of my Daily Inspiration. This is because I was amid a complex voyage to move all of my servers – jimcarroll.com, my mailing list system at insight.jimcarroll.com, my other inspiration site at daily.jimcarroll.com, as well as a bunch of family and friends sites – onto a new server infrastructure that would cut my monthly costs in half. It was a complex project, and seemed that for every step forward, I was taking three back.

Until I wasn’t, and success was to be found.

Later this morning, I’ll walk onto a stage in Indianapolis and share my insight on the role of AI in the future of manufacturing. It will be a great presentation – of that I am confident! But what has led to this confidence is many years at the ‘school of hard knocks.’ Over a 35-year speaking career, I’ve had a lot of less-than-spectacular moments on stage – not disasters, but not my greatest moments either. That’s because I had to learn the essence of performance, doing quite a few things wrong before learning how to do many things consistently right.

Learning from failure is also all about ‘letting go.’ Remember my key phrase? “At some moment in time, we transition from the shame of who we were into pride for who we have become.” That’s the type of attitude that should fuel your drive into tomorrow. Letting go of the past – and your past failures – is often the key step in learning how to move forward. You won’t learn from your failures if you aren’t prepared to let them go!

There’s a saying that is often shared – ‘fail early, fail fast, fail often!’

There couldn’t be a better mindset for moving yourself into tomorrow!