is failure even real?

This newsletter is inspired by a conversation I recently had with the lovely

Kelsey Schaefer

. You can listen to the clip above or check out the full episode this Friday!

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Let me ask you a question I’ve been thinking about:

Do you think there’s such a thing as failure?

In school, we all understood what it meant to fail. You got the answer wrong, your grade dropped. Fail enough times and you got held back. The system literally punished you for not knowing things yet.

So we learned to avoid mistakes. To see them as something bad.

But then you step into the real world and that whole framework falls apart.

Especially if you’re building something cool.

Because to do anything meaningful, you have to fail. And probably a lot more than you’ll be comfortable with. You have to get a bunch of answers wrong. You have to try things that don’t work.

And you need to learn to be okay with that.

Because the faster you can stop caring about that and just see it as feedback, as the tax of figuring it out, the faster you actually make progress. Failure is a checkpoint. It’s not the wall we’ve been taught it should be. It’s a marker that says “okay, you learned something here, now what?”

As a perfectionist eldest child, it pains me to say:

You’re not going to get it right the whole time. That’s just not how life works.

What matters is the rate at which you learn from failure.

Because learning is just same condition, new behavior.

You get rejected, you adjust your approach, you try again.

That’s not failure. That’s iteration. That’s progress in action.

I’m convinced that the only real failure (the kind that actually stops you) is when you convince yourself you’ve already failed and use that as justification to quit.

That’s where I find myself getting stuck sometimes.

I’ll desperately hold on to some story in my head about why it didn’t work instead of just seeing it as data and moving forward. But I’m slowly realizing that having a bad relationship with failure is going to make my journey way harder than it needs to be.

Because if you’re building something, if you’re growing as a person (and they’re the same thing) you’re doing something you’ve never done before. There’s a lot to figure out. It’s hard by default.

So you might as well get cozy with it. Learn to reframe it.

As

Kelsey Schaefer

recently told me:

You either learn or you win. Either way, you’ve made progress.

So that’s the frame I’m operating from now.

And honestly? It makes the whole thing a lot lighter.

Jarrich ~