SAT. ACT. GPA. Majors. Scholarships. College and career choices. College acceptance. Financial Aid. Demands,  many of which are performance based, for today’s high schoolers. What pressure!

Our daughter is a junior this year and is in the throws of all these demands, deadlines, and decisions. However, her decision making process began when she was in elementary school concerned about her GPA and focused on getting into college. We didn’t even know she knew what a GPA was let alone why she was so focused on college acceptance already. But she’s always been a goal-oriented planner.

The truth is who doesn’t like to meet goals, pass tests, and amount to something. There is nothing wrong with that. The idea of failing isn’t exactly something we strive for, right? But the danger comes when fearing failure overshadows the process of learning and growing.

Failure then becomes the enemy. But is it really? Isn’t the potential for learning and growth there when we fail? I once heard at a writers conference, “Failure is evidence that you tried.” How true. If we never try so we won’t potentially fail, that isn’t success. Failure just shows that you gave it a shot!

We are all human and we all will fail from time to time at something. The problem isn’t that we fail, but in how we respond when we do. Do we get back up, learn and tweak things, and try again? Here are some people that did:

*Walt Disney was fired by the editor of a newspaper for lacking imagination and not having great ideas.

*Abraham Lincoln failed when he campaigned for a seat in the Illinois General Assembly.

*Henry Ford failed at businesses which left him broke five times before he started the Ford Motor Company.

*Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard his junior year of school and failed at his first business.

*Colonel Sanders had difficulty selling his chicken at first with his secret recipe being rejected 1,009 times.

*Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.

Failure isn’t the end, but an opportunity and springboard to learn and grow into what’s ahead!