Failure, A Story in Success.

The most important step to success is failure. 

Photo by: @MidwinterPhoto

Let’s talk failure.
I know you’re thinking “we can fail on our own, what do we need you for?”. Well I’ve failed too, lots! So many lessons to be learned from failing, let you heed mine and hopefully minimize the failing yourself. We can’t talk success without first talking failure, then talking failure some more. Seriously though I’m 38 years old, 6 feet 4 inches tall, and weigh 220 pounds, with my height, size, great hands, and love of sports I should have been a professional athlete or something. I failed at it, I have many stories about how I failed at those dreams. 

We talk lots about setting SMART goals, well I’ve set many STUPID goals over the the years (Spent Time Unaccomplishing Priority Items in my Day)

I’ll go back to the beginning of last year, that’s where it all began for my smarter or re-imaged focus on healthy living as a “dad”. I learned so many lessons from that failure and on goal-setting in my current life of family, career, health, and fitness. I’ll talk goals more in-depth in a future post.

In looking to step into a healthier daily lifestyle for myself, at the start of 2017 I set out a goal or resolution for the year. I’d never set any resolutions before and honestly didn’t believe in them, but I also was at a point I needed to make a change for myself, my wife, and my then 3 year old daughter. My previous methods were not working consistently enough. 

My goal was 10,000 minutes of exercise for the year. Do the math, that’s 27 mins per day. Not awful but so unrealistic. The problem with my “27mins per day is no problem!” is that if you miss a day, it’ll happen, you now need to make up 54 mins the next day or start to fall behind the goal. Miss a few of those and you now have to do 28, 29, 35 minutes per
day for the remainder of the year. 

I was trying to trick myself into continuous exercise throughout the year, but realize I was setting the bar way too high and expecting too much of myself to sustain it. 

Shorter term I managed to attain it, along with managing through some pretty tough challenges that were going on in my family life. The first month was a struggle, February got better, and I really kicked it into gear from March to July. It then began to fall apart; summer had kicked in, I was still behind because I was digging out from a hole and much-needed rest days, and I began to feel deflated with my inability to close the gap with my 10,000 min target. I gave up and quit naturally as the second half of the year was looking bleak. I’ll talk more in another post about what exercises I’d do and more importantly where I do them for maximum gain. I also wasn’t counting the hour long skate sessions with my daughter or running around the park with her, only the high intensity interval training stuff (HIIT).

In hindsight, I should have been excited with my progress and that I was inching closer to 5000mins of exercise in 7-8 months and that I was averaging over 20minutes of tough 
interval exercise per day, but all I kept envisioning was the fact I was behind. I should have been proud of myself that I was up to doing almost 300 push-ups per day, yes you read that right, and that I could drop and give 50 push-ups no problem.
I complicated the whole thing, thinking too much of the overall goal and not about the amazing wins and progress throughout. It’s funny how you get distracted and lose sight of things while you’re tunnel visioned. But I also made it easy for myself to quit, setting unrealistic goals rather than small steps of improvement to sustain the behaviour. 

From this failure, along with others in my past, I’ve found a way to set goals in a way that forces myself to grow as an individual. Having an end in mind, I’ll talk further about that another time, but what was I to do once the year was up....it would all be over with. 

Setting the marathon goal, booking it, and being sure it was close enough not to lose sight of the goal, these are ways I managed to stay on track. If I’d said to myself “next year I’m going to run a marathon” it would have never happened, as that’s too far away and other things will come up in life. I also achieved the marathon completion target but failed at my time by about 15 mins. I could hang my head in sorrow 

for the failure there, or lift my head in pride for having completed a marathon, raised some funds, and finished in a reasonable time without injury. For some, I had no business being out there or signing up for a full marathon but possibility in life is what you make it.

Failure will happen, it’s so important that it does, it’ll challenge you to push forward, take in a lesson or two, and continue on stronger than you were before. Simply remember the lessons: don’t over-complicate, simplify, be good, and find the success in the failure.

DadBud