“The longer you live, the more you fail....Failure is the mark of a life well lived.”
-Oathbringer, Brandon Sanderson

Fail fast and fail often. I’ve always hated that saying. It’s for the weak. It’s like you’re trying to fail.

But as I grow older and my story--wiser--I am now beginning to embrace failure more and more. And not to see it as something that defines me, but as something that improves me.

As the youngest of 5 brothers, we Landrums used to have a saying: “If you’re not bleeding, you’re not trying hard enough.” We don’t just say it; we believe it. I just returned from a brothers’ weekend (3 of us are solidly in our 4th decade with one in his 5th). And this weekend ended up involving a lot of laughs, but it also involved blood and stitches (and more laughs, as only brothers can do).

Why? Because we tried. Albeit, it was something stupid, but we tried and we failed. We learned. It hurt. We laughed. We lived; life.

Every now and again I self-reflect and go back through my life and I’m discovering and now facing some of my failures. I realize I’ve rationalized away a good bit of them. My story used to be the reason I didn’t succeed at this or that was because of someone or something else. But if I, if we, can look at our failures head on, face them and acknowledge them, we can then learn from them and allow them to be part of us. And eventually we can accept our failures, which really means, we can begin to accept ourselves.

I’d much rather live a life where I tried, failed at alot, but succeeded swimmingly at a few things, than to not have tried, “never” failing, but accomplishing or realizing nothing. That sounds like an extremely boring way to live life.

In other words, give me the blood and the stitches. I’m beginning to embrace--although maybe I always had, that Failure, is a mark of a life well lived.