Forefront Families

Whoever said there is no such thing as failure has lost touch with reality!  Of
course there is such a thing.  It is in the dictionary.  It means ‘nonperformance of
something due or expected’ (Random House Dictionary)  You can’t gloss over the
word and call it something else just because society thinks it is a dirty word.  To
refuse to accept the word is senseless and a product of our indulgent culture.  By
doing this we are not allowing ourselves to learn from the experience or to teach
our children how to deal with not meeting expectations whatever they are. 

When we were in high school in New Zealand we had to pass a State-wide exam. 
Only 50% could pass so there was obviously a 50% failure rate.  It made us work
very hard and we all knew that if we didn’t make it, we had to repeat the whole
year again.  I repeated the year!  Brian repeated a year.  His two brothers repeated
a year.  This is reality.  If you don’t do the work, you don’t pass.  It didn’t hurt us. It
actually taught us how important it is to try hard, not to just scrape through, but to
excel.   If we don’t learn early that there are consequences for not meeting
expectations, then we will never make it in the adult work world.  We will always be
making excuses that it was someone else’s fault.  No it isn’t.  We put in the hard
yards and enjoy the results.  Brian, his brothers and I became university graduates
and we would not have had so great a resolve to succeed, had we not learned
through failure in early exams.

Now, there are times when we have little choice over whether we win or lose.  We
can train vigorously for a race, but we cannot guarantee we will be the winner.  It is
wrong for parents to give kids the message that if you are not the winner, you are a
failure.  That is NOT true.  In that case, we should not compare ourselves with
others, but compare ourselves against our own performance.  If we are beating our
own times, then we are achieving.

Everyone in the world will have a story of failure.  Some use failure as a sentence
of doom, while others, like us, say, I am not going to let this beat me, 'I will show
them!' and rise to it.  How do you see it?