Tonight, I will host another meeting with my Emerging Leaders participants. Our topic for this evening is “Failing Forward.” Failing is an interesting topic. No one likes to fail and certainly no one wants to fail, but failing seems to be the way to success. There are catch phrases pushing us in that direction like “Fail more, fail faster,” “Fail fast, fail forward, fail often,” and “Fail, fail again, fail better.” How does one actually engage in all of this failing?

What I found was that none of the so-called failure experts was really encouraging all of us to fail. Failure wasn’t necessarily the target, trying was. All of those catch-phrases about failing can be summed up in this, perhaps more positive and more encouraging, phrase: Keep going!!! You see, there’s failure and there’s quitting and they are two VERY different things.

Let’s gloss over the failure part for a second and simply focus on this: for every day that you and I keep going—someone else quits! Today, maybe 1,000 people (or 100,000 people) didn’t have the guts to fail again today. To fail, you have to try, and if you’re trying, that means you didn’t quit. So keep going! Whatever it is that you want—DO NOT QUIT!

With Gratitude,

Beth