Every year, at the end of the year, I like to choose or write an aphorism that something I’ve learned during the past year.
For 2022: “Success and failure are not mutually exclusive.”
An example: Hamster Endurance in 2022 was a horrible failure for me. I didn’t reach 100 miles, didn’t get a buckle.
And at the same time, given the injury history of 2022, getting to 67.6 miles was something of a badass achievement - a success, if you will.
Every success has some element of failure - you wanted to be faster, you wanted to go just a bit farther, whatever. Every failure has some element of success.
We can choose to focus on the failure, or we can focus on the success. When we choose, we are choosing what story about our own identity we tell ourselves.