The Game is Grit
And the players are Failure
Recently I’ve been trying to grapple with the idea of failure.
Growing up, I was told that failure is not really failure. Failure is more of an “opportunity to learn”, they would tell me. Failure is, in fact, a step on the path towards success and no matter who you are or what you’ve done, one thing is for sure, you will experience failure in some way, shape, or form.
This is great and all, but what is hard for me to overcome is not the failure itself, rather how it makes you feel. For me that feeling has been hard, like really hard. It’s hard because it’s not clear what is over the horizon. In recent encounters with failure, the aftermath feels…cloudy, like I’m lost in a fog. The kind of fog that looms over me in all directions, engulfing me in the feeling of being trapped and I don’t know which way to go. The sense that any step forward and I run the risk of falling off an unforeseen cliff, but if I don’t, the obstacles that will find me scares me just as much.
It’s a scary place to be and, unfortunately, I’ve found myself here repeatedly over the last year, especially when it’s come to fitness. So what now? What’s next? How do I take the next step forward and how do you know it’s the right move to take? More pressing still is deciding if I want to take a step at all.
Your goals are not what make you unique. Many people have similar goals, for example the goal of getting good grades in school, scoring the winning touchdown, landing that promotion, first job, the list goes on. Goals shared by many individuals are not hard to find, and these goals inherently don’t define who we are, even if we achieve them. It’s not our goals that make us unique from one another, but rather our path and grit to achieve them.
What is grit? How do I use it? Can it help me take that next step through the fog?
Grit is defined by action. The actions you take every day from when you first wake up and every day before you go to sleep. Grit is formed by the habits we subscribe to every day and we maintain day after week after month after year. Grit is a commitment to improvement; improving on your passion and inherently requires you take step after step, regardless if it’s the wrong one. Even if it is a step over the cliff, grit gives us the strength to pick ourselves up and to keep moving forward, no matter our circumstances. Our power to keep going is stronger than the goals we make, this power makes us unique.
I guess that’s my lesson in all of this. I can’t know whether the next step I take will just lead me right back to my mistake, but if I don’t move forward I’ll never know, and worst still I owe it to myself and my commitment to my passions to find out how far I can go, even if it is through the fog.
