The key to success is failure. It sounds weird and like I’m going at things backwards, but this is one thing I have learned that holds true through everything.
I was reading Shae’s post about her epiphany and I was struck by how similar her thought processes were to mine. It’s easier to pretend that you don’t care about your blog, than to put it all out there and run the risk of failing. After all, failure is something that we hate and something to be avoided.
But is it really?
Every time I have done something, on this blog or in real life, that has failed, I’ve learned something. Sometimes it’s small things like how fast to whisk in oil so that my mayonnaise doesn’t split. Sometimes it’s when to keep my mouth shut to prevent my family hating me for twelve months because of something I wrote. Every step forward I make has been inspired by a string of failures.
This blog is no different and in fact it is the thing I fail at the most. I’ve never expected myself to be the perfect mother, or the perfect homemaker, but I did expect myself to be the perfect blogger. To be able to comment back every time, to read everyone and to write beautiful words that will resonate with everyone, every single time.
Blogging doesn’t work like that. Life doesn’t work like that.
My blog is becoming more successful. Showcase Tasmania is doing well, my subscriber numbers are slowly climbing and my traffic is sitting at a level I am comfortable with.
To get here, I’ve had to fail numerous times. For every five pitches I send, four businesses ignore me. For every contact I make and click with, there is someone who thinks I’m an idiot. For every blog post that does well on traffic, there are two that don’t.
Funnily enough, I’ve found that it is the small failures that I learn the most from. Working out what I did wrong and how to not do it again, I learn what I should have done instead. Sure, it’s trial and error a lot of the time, but that is life, isn’t it?
Failure is scary. No one wants to fail. We all want to be successful, all of the time.
However, I’m not sure that you can have success, if you didn’t build it on the back of failure.
And the only thing I can see that all successful people have in common is: They refused to give up and stop trying.