Failure Is Not an Option...or Is It?

I have a confession. I'm very competitive and hate failing. Whew; that felt good to admit. Not that people like to fail, but I sometimes take it to heart.

I've learned a lot of things in my internship this last past 3 months - writing media advisories, pitching the media and etc. One of the most important things I'm learning is how to really bounce back from failure and not letting that failure hurt your performance.

Poker players have a term for what happens after you fail: being on tilt. Being on tilt really hurts your performance while playing poker. You make bad bets, bad reads on opposing players and just make horrible decisions. The thing about being on tilt is that it's a very slippery slope. You are upset, that emotion forces you to make bad decisions and those decisions make you fail even more. One time, I folded pocket Aces. I don't know why, but I felt like it was the best decision; it wasn't. I realized I would have won the hand and a good amount of money; instead I was on tilt, and it took me awhile to bounce back. It cost me a decent amount of money to pull me out of tilt.

Recently, I had to make my first pitch to the media. I'm not going to lie, to me it's not that hard to be on the phone (I was on the phone for 8 hours a day in a previous job), but pitching is a totally different monster. Pitching is something we never really were taught in college. It wasn't a disaster, but having spent a lot of time preparing and rehearsing my pitch only to have it basically cut down to "Oh, yeah, I'll send it to your email" killed me. Now, I'm probably being hard on myself, but I took that as a huge failure. I was on tilt. Then, I sat down and thought about what had happened. I could take it that I had failed and should never call the media again, or I could take it as I failed, but next time I'm not going to say this but say that instead. I chose the latter and grew from my experience. My next pitch went better, in case you were wondering.

I've learned that failure is not necessarily a bad thing. Take what Robert F. Kennedy said about the matter:
"Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly."

Here are some other cool quotes about failure.