Disclaimers

• Failure in the title = mistakes, not abuse
• Not attempting to apologize, excuse, or justify abuse or predatory behavior in our communities
• Some of what is discussed may be triggering, it’s not my/our intention, please do what you must to care for yourself
• Goal = present a different way to view things, not to tell you what you should or shouldn’t do or judge you

Quotes

(Sourced from the Internet, so of course they are 100% accurate </sarcasm>, but their lessons are true in my experience)

• "I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying" - Michael Jordan (one of the best, if not the best professional basketball players ever)
• "We all learn lessons in life. Some stick, some don't. I have always learned more from rejection and failure than from acceptance and success." - Henry Rollins (musician, poet, critic of culture)
• "Success is not the absence of failure; it's the persistence through failure." - Aisha Tyler (pop culture icon best known as Lana from the television program Archer)
• "I haven't failed -- I've just found 10,000 that won't work." – Thomas Edison (arguably America’s greatest inventor – DC electricity, fluoroscopy, phonograph, motion picture camera, light bulb, and other things we depend on every day)
• "Do not judge me by my success, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again." - Nelson Mandela (South African anti-apartheid activist and politician who served as the first president of South Africa from 1994 to 1999)

The common thread is that a lot of successful and impactful people see failure as a valuable part of their journey.

Aside: Video game speedrunners… they play a video game thousands or tens of thousands of time with unbelievable accuracy, to try to complete the game or a specific objective as quickly as possible. Sometimes their goal is to save milliseconds off a previous record time.