A week ago I put a question on the ILoveFailure Facebook page and asked my audienece to share their answers with me.
Can Failure be useful? Can you think of examples from your own life when it has led to something positive? I got a fair amount of responses but there is one that I am really proud of. This sharing came from my son Gabriel. When I was younger I failed in simple tasks; reading and speaking. I was always one step behind of the class and was not able to express my ideas or speak clearly without pausing, miss pronounced words. Several people would comment or ask me why I had such a weird voice? Some people thought that I had some type of a mental disability. After years of continuous hard work, a lot of effort, and the support of my parents and teachers, my vocabulary and reading skills are at my normal age/grade level. One of my favorite things to do is creative writing and I have also earned the right to be part of the Honor Club at my school. Now I have noticed, these failures and set backs I experienced were all very important and necessary for my success. They increased my will power and have gotten me to where I am today. Thanks to my failures, I have succeeded. Gabriel Fraga-Abaza – 14 years old. Why I shared this with you? We all have some type of weakness, defects or shortcoming. I call them circumstances. The dictionary defines CIRCUMSTANCE an event or fact that causes or helps to cause something to happen, typically something undesirable. “Typically something undesirable” I disagree. I see a circumstance as an event that could be used as an opportunity. The important point is to understand where you end up in your life has less to do with your circumstances than with where you decide to go in spite of your circumstances. At home all of my 3 kids understand this concept, they know that the results of their failures or successes are determined not by a circumstance but by their attitude. “To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities.” ― Bruce Lee
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 Today, I am just in the mood to complain… Ha, ha, even if I complain or nag nobody would listen to me. In reality, I decided to write about the difference between complaining and nagging. Yesterday, I was sitting at a restaurant bar before a dinner meeting. Thinking about writing a blog, but my mind was completely blank. I could not think of a concept to write about. Writing for me is not something that comes naturally. I have an engraved dyslexia and when I speak English or Spanish people have a difficult time understanding. Language is not my forte. So becoming a writer, which is one of my passions, has become an uphill battle; a GOOD battle. While trying to come up with a concept, I eavesdropped on the conversation between Brian, the bartender, and his customers. “How are you doing?” A customer asks… “Somewhere between great and outstanding…” “How is your day?” A couple asks… “Another day in paradise…” Watching the interaction, I though to myself: what a great attitude this guy has. Brian, I said: “I like to write about failure and the ability to cope with it; for sure, you have a good story about your life and your failures.” Before leaving, he looked puzzled as if asking himself: “what does this bald guy want?” After a few minutes he returns and approaches me… "Well, I have been a bartender for 37 years. Slowly, I was able to save some money and decided to open my own restaurant; that was in 2006. My restaurant was doing well, but I did not know that recession was coming in 2007. I was surprised, suddenly people stopped coming in. I tried to keep the doors open but in 2008 after constantly reinvesting money in the business, I had to shut down the doors. I took a loss of around a $1,000,000." Ouch! "How did you manage to get out of the hole?” I asked "Well, I have to give a lot of credit to my wife who has been very supportive. She always told me not to worry, we will manage to bounce back; we have each other and best, we did not loose our home." He said, “I do not have any regrets. I did what I was supposed to do. I tried, and now it’s done. Now I need to move forward. I am 57 years old and I am making a good living as a bartender. My job is still in the hospitality industry, which I enjoy and I love listening to people. I am happy here.” He continued, “My clients come to see me; they are here to talk to someone. They want to share their accomplishments or defeats. My job is to host them with a great attitude and to listen to them. They do not want to know about my problems, they all have their own!” This tale is a familiar one to all of us. We all have stories of failure; but here is the tricky question; Would you have reacted to your failures with the same positive attitude as Brian? Most of the time NO! First we always look for an excuse or somebody to blame. We regret and complain about it but really we just don’t complain about it, we constantly nag about it. To complain means to express dissatisfaction or annoyance about a state of affairs or an event. To nag is to annoy or irritate a person with persistent fault finding or continuous urging. According to Robin Kowalski, Ph.D. from the article Do you complain too much? There are 2 categories of complaints: instrumental and expressive. Instrumental complaints are goal oriented, meaning that we verbalize the problem in hopes of bringing about change. Expressive complaints have a different mission: to let the speaker get something off her chest. But here's the downside: Some people abuse expressive complaining, grumbling incessantly with no real interest in dialogue, problem solving, or human connection. Bad complainers are annoying at best, depressing at worst. They spread negativity and give griping a bad name I am a strong believer that if something is wrong, you should speak up to bring a change. Also, you should always express your feelings, which is something that my wife always complains about. She always tells me, “sometimes you should keep your thoughts to yourself.” Brian understood this concept; he knows that tormenting people won’t change anything. Like he says: "I need to be positive, I cannot allow my attitude ruin the night for the guests." We should follow his advice; nobody really wants to hear about our issues. Everybody has plenty of his or her own problems to deal with. Failure is just a mistake. Brian had a dream and he was determined to follow it. He did it and due to unfortunate circumstances he had to move along.
Remember, naggers are downers and no one wants to be around them; do not be one of them! Stick to the instrumental complaints, the ones that you can make a change. Peace out! “If you don't think every day is a great day try going without one.” - Jim Evans   It has been a year since I began working on my blog "I Love Failure."
A year where I have been able to create a sizable audience and improve my writing skills while having fun working on it. Although over 300,000 people weekly visit my I Love Failure Facebook page, only a tiny percentage of the visitors share my blogs or like the page. I see the traffic going through my page, but it is like ghost traffic… my readers do not leave a mark or a foot print. So I have been thinking, why my audience does not share my writings? All my readers understand that in order for an individual to succeed one must go through failures and many defeats. Despite the fact that they are aware of this rule, they do not want to be related to failure; they are ashamed or afraid of failure. Like always I have to question: Why people are frightened, scared, terrified, fearful, shamefaced, guilty, repentant, apologetic, embarrassed, mortified, humiliated about FAILURE? Why, the answer is easy… We live in a society that has winners or losers. At school from an early age we are taught to admire success and to distance ourselves from failure; success is great and failure is worthless. Our school system is made for kids to memorize facts and to be graded on how well they were able to memorize those facts. With good memory you get an A, become an honor student and admired by everyone. These kids enjoy continuous success with out really being tested in life. Only a few teachers are willing to teach kids to think for themselves, to use their minds, try new concepts, take risks, to be independent and most importantly to accept failure and to cope with it. These teachers understand that a grade is not as important as the effort made and the lessons learned. We are taught to worship perfection. We admire the student that has a perfect GPA, has a perfect attendance record and never misbehaves. We are made to believe that this person would make the perfect professor, spouse, employee or even a magnificent leader. We are so wrong… Perfection means that this person has never really been tested and has never taken risks. This person has only been following instructions. An untested person is likely to break down under a hostile environment, which are the difficulties and challenges of the real world. Continuous success makes you blind and makes you confortable with the environment. You begin to drift and stop looking for opportunities thus losing the ability to adapt and change. To RISK is to have the possibility that something unpleasant or unwelcome will happen. When we take risks we will fail, no exceptions! And when we fail, we learn to cope with it and we learn to manage failure. A few years ago, I became too comfortable and too confident with my continuous success and began to drift allowing the currents to handle me. At that moment I was partially sighted and failed to see the changes taking place in my business and family. I lost vision of reality and the result was a collision; a strong collision. I ruined a couple of my businesses and almost destroyed my family. The result of this collision was what I lost in wealth I gained in knowledge. First I learned that I would not allow myself to be a drifter again and most importantly I understood that through failure a person develops persistence and learns to assimilate difficulties. Do not take me wrong, through my writing and speeches my goal is to motivate people to follow their dreams, aim high and succeed and to understand that failure is just a lesson in life that comes before success. On the other hand, I do not promote self-satisfaction, self-congratulation or self-regard. Success is a temporary stage and we can’t allow ourselves to move passively and become complacent with the current situation. Now, understanding that people do not appreciate, do not like to acknowledge and they do not want to be related to FAILURE; how am I going motivate people to share my writings or to press like on my FB page? I have come up with a great solution… I am going to change the tittle of the blog from “I Love Failure” to “I Love Success”; I am almost certain that with this new title over a million shares and likes will appear in no time. This solution could work, but it would change completely my mission for I Love Failure: “A platform dedicated to show how great things result from failures!” From my own experience I know that with perseverance and determination you can accomplish anything. I will keep working on my blog convinced that my numbers will grow in a steady pace. “Failures are the speed bumps in life that matter! They are not regrets but small disappointments that wake up the strength within us! Failures are the process of learning and improving! Without failures we simply are at a status quo! Success is built on many failures" - Mauricio Fraga-Rosenfeld “It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.” - Bill Gates PLEASE SHARE THIS BLOG WITH YOUR FRIENDS Thank you  Today I saw this great story on the news...
An amazing 64 years old woman managed to swim from Havana to Key West, Florida. 53 hours in the water and never getting out. What an incredible story! I asked myself, who is this amazing lady? Immediately I googled her name and found out so much information about her and her life. Diana Nyad, an American author, journalist, and long-distance swimmer who is known for her world-record endurance championships. On top of all that, she was also ranked 30th among U.S. women squash players. On Monday, she emerged from the ocean having swum roughly 110 miles and still had the strength to walk ashore. Officially, Nyad became the first swimmer to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage. It was her fifth attempt after several failures. In 1978 was the first attempt and then in 2011 and 2012. Upon reaching shore Nyad had three things to tell the TV reporters and the world that was watching her achieve her lifelong dream: "One, We should never ever give up. Two, You’re never too old to chase your dreams Three, Swimming looks like a solitary sport, but really it’s a team effort." Never give up, have determination: Determination is defined as firmness of purpose; Resoluteness. We all have been in a situation where we were determined to accomplish something but quickly found a reason not to accomplish our goal. How easy is it to find excuses? How easy is it to quit? How easy is it to forget our goals? We should take the word easy out of our vocabulary and keep reminding ourselves that something worthwhile takes a lot of work and most importantly, determination! Diana Nyad has the word determination embedded in her DNA. “One of the most common causes of failure is the habit of quitting when one is overtaken by temporary defeat.”- Napoleon Hill You are never too old to chase your dreams: You are too old, when you decide that you are old. Usually, grandparents are always giving us great advice and among other things they always mention “If I was your age, I WOULD be doing so and so...” “If I was your age...” they live in the past with their memories or regrets! Nyad does not live in the past; As a young lady she was not able to cross the ocean but now at 64 she accomplished another one of her dreams. I am very sure that she has some regrets like all of us; yet, these regrets do not stop her from trying again and again to keep building new memories. It looks like a solitary sport, but really it’s a team effort: In life, at work, at home, in sports, in order to succeed you always need to believe in yourself. To be confident is extremely important but also you need to have a team that believes in you; weather it is your wife, your kids, co-workers, teachers... "To succeed you need to become part of a forest" this is a notion that I constantly preach. In other for a tree to grow steady, strong and age it must be part of a dense mass. In the forest all trees work together as a blanket and protect each other from the wind or harsh weather. The roots of the forest will prevent mudslides and if a tree falls it does not come crashing down at once. It is supported by the surrounding trees. Nyad understands this concept; she knows that without her team she would not be able to accomplish this incredible task. In reality it is a very simple concept to understand; if you grow by yourself, you fold by yourself. At the end, Diana Nyad was able to fulfill her life long dream; she believed in it, she never stopped thinking about it and she was determined to do it! I wonder how many of us at 64 would be in some type of mental or physical shape to be able to swim at least ONE mile... "Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter." - Mark Twain PLEASE SHARE THIS BLOG WITH YOUR FRIENDS Thank you |
Who I am today as a person is largely due to my failures! Archives
January 2024
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