Celebrating Failure

1. I fail at something almost everyday of my life, this isn't a bad thing though. This summer one of the biggest failures occurred during the first few weeks of Summer A. We started the summer understaffed at work. As the manager, I felt like it was my responsibility to make sure we were properly staffed so this felt like a huge failure on my part. After the first week of feeling bad about myself, I took this as a challenge and sought to overcome it. Summer B was much better and we had just the right amount of staff. However, some people had to go out of town and I was left trying to cover a large amount of shifts. Again it felt like a failure on my part for not having enough staff. After talking to my boss, she convinced me that I had not failed but learned that it is better to be overstaffed and have people with fewer hours than they asked for, than to be understaffed and have everyone at the absolute maximum they asked for.
2. I learned that failure is more of a challenge than an ultimatum. There is always another way out, it just takes some creative thinking and good advice from someone who's been there before. This is why connections and networking are so important, you cannot possibly know everything, but someone out there can help fill in the gaps.
3. Sometimes failure really puts me down. I feel that I let a lot of people down and that I let myself down. Once I get through those feelings, I see failure as a challenge and I attempt to control what I can control and roll with the changes after that. My opinion of failure has changed this summer, but I would not say this class caused any part of that change. I think my experiences have changed that thought process. The second book I read for this class had an interesting take on failure, but reading something does not, in my opinion, change anything because you usually aren't failing while reading or going to think about the book when you fail. But that is just my opinion on the book/class.