Not everyone will understand your journey. That’s fine. It’s not their journey to make sense of. It’s yours.
Author | Photographer | CG Artist | Filmmaker
Failure is feedback. It is not the end.
Life goes on. And so, too, should you.
There is always another step to take, another dot to connect to, another way to make ourselves valuable.
We don’t always get what we strive for, but we only truly fail when we stop trying to make use of what life gives us.
Originally Published on: Nov 15, 2016
People often demonstrate their suitability for a job by the amount of effort & enthusiasm they invest to get it.
If you put in a minimal amount of effort to get a job, expect a minimal amount of results.
Never underestimate the power of a well written cover letter. Your cover letter is one place where what you say and how you say it can make you to stand out more than applicants who have more experience or better qualifications. Because, it’s easier to train people to do a job than it is to train them to be passionate or enthusiastic about it.
Comparing your journey to someone else’s or trying to follow someone else’s footsteps to get to where they got – only to end up with different results – is often extremely discouraging.
Understand that you can follow someone else’s path and still not end up where they did because you are not them – your life experiences are not the same, your resources are not the same, the timing of your progress is not the same, and the possibilities that existed for them are not the same possibilities that exist for you.
You are on your timeline, not someone else’s. This means that even if you copy every step that someone else took to get somewhere in life, your results will vary. That’s life. It’s not something to feel bad about.
The path you’re on is your own. As such, the heights you reach are dictated by the steps you take, not the steps that someone else took before you.
When you are feeling weak, always take a moment to remind yourself that you are a survivor of every hardship you’ve ever faced in life. You’ve consistently overcome the worst that life has thrown your way, year after year after year.
No one feels strong 100% of the time. Even the people you look up to and respect most in the world have been knocked down, felt unwell, or needed time to just breathe.
Life can be hard – resist the urge to beat yourself up further when it is. It’s ok to not be ok. Give yourself the time & mental space necessary to get better by refusing to focus on things that make you feel worse.
You will overcome whatever you are dealing with now, as you have with everything you’ve previously faced. This is but a very small part of your life. In the grand scheme of things, you’re doing ok. Keep going.
Rather than abandon your gift because you can’t find a way to make money from it, consider finding ways to use it to help others. Many of the most successful ventures became successful as a result of assisting people in some way.
Even if the way in which you help others doesn’t generate an income, helping others always provides benefits – some of which can be much more valuable in the long run than money.
Just a reminder: making yourself feel miserable about your mistakes is optional.
While acknowledging mistakes is important, beating yourself up over history won’t change the past, but focusing on what you learned from the experience and moving on in a productive fashion can change the future.
Life is hard enough already without abusing yourself for things you can’t change. Focus on positive progress by changing what you can.
Even for the most resolute individuals, failure is always a possibility. But there is a huge difference between letting a setback mark the end of your journey and pushing forward – despite defeats – equipped with the knowledge you learned from the experience.
Not everything we do on our journey gets us the results we want, but setbacks only lead to long-term failure if we stop putting in the effort to make progress.
What we learn from failure & unmet expectations are an integral part of achieving goals.
Keep going.
