In Love with Failing

This is part of my occasional Dumb Quotes series.

I get it, you can learn from every experience, even failure, but that’s no reason to want to fail. The self-help motivational con…I mean speakers of the world seem to be enamored with failure (or in this case, rejection). The latest dumb quote comes from none other than Tony Robbins:

I’m not sure how his world works but rejection certainly does not get me any closer to an outcome other than failure.

I’ve talked about the benefits of failure, too, but I also understand the truth in failure, that something went wrong, that I wasn’t prepared or didn’t work hard enough. I’m glad I learned the lesson but sorry I didn’t see it coming, mad I couldn’t avoid it. Tony Robbins’ supporters, however, eat this stuff up because it excuses their poor choices and gives them a free pass to say, “well, at least I’m closer to my outcome.” No, you’re not.

I’m a big advocate of staying positive in the face of a setback (though I’m not always able to) but I’ll also allow myself to be angry and upset at failure, it motivates me not to make the same mistakes again.

Failure or rejection is almost never the end of the world but its nothing to aspire to. I’d like to fix Mr. Robbins’ quote: “Learn from rejection so next time you’ll succeed and get closer to your final objective.”

So while Tony Robbins celebrates and legitimizes failure, I’ll do my best to avoid it. It’s worked well for me so far.