I’m currently running a business training program called May You Offer, and I recently added this portion to the written guide. I think this is a generally great thing to think about in life even outside of business, so I took out the business-specific portions and am sharing with you now.
Even with the best of plans, there is always a potential for failure. We can do everything right but still get an unexpected undesired result. We can do everything wrong and have something somehow work out. This means even with a masterfully crafted path, not only is there a chance you will fail to be on the path but you will likely fail to be on the path at least once.
You’ve lived your life without consciously thinking about being on a path. This training makes you think about the life you have lived and the life you want to live in order to create a path. Although the path is derived from your life, it is still something new in your life. You will need to go through a learning curve whenever you do something new, and living on a path is no different.
Read the below sections and design a failure guide for your path as well. The existence of a failure guide will be so comforting for anyone who’s fresh in your path!
Failure Is Success, Success Is Failure
Going through a learning curve means going through failures and trying again. If you want to learn how to score a free throw in basketball, you need to fail 99% of the time to eventually land that 1% of a successful goal. If you want to learn how to ride a bike, you need to fail 99% of the time to eventually learn how to ride a bike. Failure is not a setback or a proof that something isn’t working; failure and success are both part of being on the path.
Life and death are two sides of the same coin. Rest and exercise are two sides of the same coin. Just like this, failure and success are two sides of the same coin; I’d even extend this to say failure is success and success is failure.
The practical point of this way of thinking is, you must be relaxed in your failure. Take meditation, for example. I teach meditation as relaxed focus. With a relaxed mind, focus on the sensation of air as it enters and leaves your nostrils. When you lose focus and get distracted, notice that you have lost it and simply come back to the breath. When you lose focus again, come back to the breath.
At every instance of losing focus I could be stressing out, thinking “Why do I suck at meditation? Why can’t I stay focused?”. When I stress myself with every single instance of lost focus, I won't really be able to meditate sustainably and I’d eventually quit meditating altogether.
Understand that despite our best intentions sometimes our plans won't come true. But all we need to do is just come back to the path.
Repentance
Although we must account for failure, we can't keep allowing ourselves to fail and not do anything about it.
The word “repentance” seems like we’re committing some grave sin and we have to repent to some greater power to absolve ourselves from the sin. It’s not like that; it’s an attempted translation of the word 참회(懺悔), which literally translates to “repent-repent” (lol). It’s not that we’ve done something wrong, we just have to actually take the time to analyze WHY we lost focus / fell off the bandwagon of our path.
Without this kind of an accounting practice for yourself, there's nothing really motivating you to stay on your path when you're on an extended period of not feeling like following it. The path is a happy way to get to a happy destination. The path can make complete cognitive sense to you and you may think it’s a great way to live your life. But as I always say, the head and heart are not always necessarily aligned. You can think you’re on a good path while actually having reservations about it in the heart.
This kind of discrepancy and our karma from the past makes it difficult for us to adapt to a new path of life. So every time we notice ourselves falling off of our path, use the below guide to repent for your mistakes (I do this every morning in my morning prayer).
The actual guide is too business related so I’ll leave today’s writing at this. I’ll perhaps share it in the future after I generalize it a bit more. It’s already mid-May, but if you’re interested in participating in May You Offer give me an email at billy@julylifecoach.com!