Yep, all the time and good things always come after.
My father told me many many years ago that I always had to learn lessons the hard way. What he meant was that I have to make the mistake to learn from it, and I thought it was profound.
Took a long time for me to learn that’s what life is. You try, fail, and try again. You learn from it and succeed, and in the end does it really count as a failure? All the good things in my life have come out of all the bad.
Did three years in the feds. Damn near ruined my life but I worked hard and became an essential employee at a company that was willing to hire me knowing my past.
I wanna say I’m blessed or some shit but in reality I fucked up bad paid the price then fixed it with the help of good people.
College was a fucking mess. It took me 14 years on and off to graduate and wrecked my finances.
But I fucking finished it.
Then I had trouble getting a job in my field and I worked retail for years and it sucked. But I eventually got a job at the front desk of the permit office at the city, and everything started coming together. Within 6 months I got a major promotion. A year later another, smaller city approached me, etc.
I am now making good money in a field I love. My coworkers are great, people respect me, and life is getting better all the time.
Because while I may have stalled several times, I never fucking quit.
I don’t usually get back up, I just go somewhere else or do something else where the novelty makes me feel like I haven’t failed yet. Weirdly, I got pretty good at things over time doing this and I fail a lot less
Currently in the throes of attempting to trade for a living.
What has helped me immensely is to ‘denature’ goals so that I can measure success beyond something binary like “did I achieve X”. Instead, I will specify more subtle signs of progress/improvement, and track those instead. That way, even when I fall short of the ideal outcome, I still have actionable, helpful takeaways that can assist w/ my next attempt. Repeat ad nauseum until success.
Another suggestion is to read books like ‘Grit’ and ‘Resilience’ and ‘Mindset’.
It has been said that you only really fail if you don’t learn from the experience, this is true in most cases, escpacially those that makes you ask this question.
So to answer your question, you learn snd show others that you have learned.
Say you are working a papermill and you make a misstake causing and entire batch of product worth €5000000 to be ruined, a bad manager would just fire you, a good manager would understand that he just spent €5000000 training you not to do that, and that training would stick, and keep you.
My life is a string of failures. I won’t lie I’m probably not a person you want to end up like.
The way I keep going now is by realizing that the thing I’m running from isn’t a sense of failure, or a bad self image. The things I’m running from are literal hunger, literal pain, literal cold. As in, I’ve been homeless before, and I’m fortunate enough to have come through that intact, but it put a fear into me that drives me.
The reason I keep trying is because I’ve seen how fast it gets worse when I stop trying. Like, at my age things fall apart fucking fast if I start letting the depression win.
I’m now at the point where I know the steps I need to take to keep depression away. And I’m considering depression to be like “A state of no motivation”.
I’m starting to get a little stable, which is making space to see new larger meanings, larger than just keeping myself alive and out of pain.
Now I’m starting to see the other people around me trapped in the hopelessness. So I’ve decided I’m going to start being that one person who makes new social connections. Who reaches out and takes the initiative. Because others have done that for me.
So, staying alive gives me the motivation to get up and push hard. But not always consistently. Now, I’m starting to run into limitations in my social skills. I’m rough, and caustic. I cuss a lot.
Now the whole game is learning to keep a tight operation. I can afford to fall off many different wagons, while I’m surviving, and still survive. I’m actually pretty hardy, and I can survive a lot of the effects of my fuckups in life.
But what can’t survive those intermittent collapses — those junk food and weed binges — is my role in the community. I want to be there for people who need someone, and if I’m inconsistent then I can’t do that.
So that’s the meaning pulling me up from fighter into … shopkeeper? Priest? I don’t know. Someone with a consistent schedule, whom you know where to find, who’s got the energy and time to give you some attention when you badly need it.
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