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This week I am intending to fail at something. By this I don’t mean that I will purposefully try not to succeed. Rather, I mean that I will purposefully go out of my comfort zone. When we are afraid of failure, we tend to remain stagnant. By embracing failure as the occasional inevitability, we can push ourselves as human beings to the very edge of our capacity.

When we fail, and the world still turns, and our lives keep going, and our friends and family are still by our side, we realize a fundamental truth: nothing we strive for is as pressingly important in the big scheme of things as we try to make it seem. All we can really hope to do is strive to be the best that we can be.

Think of your favorite heroes in your favorite books, or in real life. What makes them human is not their successes, but their failures. We don’t admire our heroes because they kept succeeding. We admire them because they fell and got back up again. To me, there is nothing more brave than being willing to fail. This means facing our own inadequacies head on, embracing our own imperfections, embracing our very greatest fears and yet being willing to grow past them and fight for the life we want, even when it is difficult to do so.

Is there something you can do this week that you will fail at? What will this teach you?