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Failure or opportunity? Addiction and life lessons
August 5th, 2011
After almost 400 articles for All About Addiction I find it hard sometimes to motivate and write more for the website. Still, writing is why I started this whole thing and it’s the lifeblood of the whole enterprise.
So this week I made a commitment to write every day. I was doing pretty well until yesterday when I missed a day. True, I was off work because of back pain and lack of sleep (11 month old at home) but that’s no real excuse.
Still, the way I see it there are two ways to look at this, or any other event that involves not reaching your goal or keeping true to commitments:
- Failure – Some people choose to look at messing up as a sign of failure, often one that signals their inability to make things happen and to stick to commitments.
- Learning opportunity – Others decide that they’re going to learn from their mistake and figure out how to improve next time.
Even though I’m using missing a little writing assignment as the example here, I think that the same applies to any time you mess up. You get to decide – Failure or Opportunity.
Whether it’s a relapse, a screw-up on the job that gets you fired, or cheating on your spouse. No matter what the outcome, you can decide on how to perceive it. I personally think that it doesn’t even matter how often you make mistakes, although obviously if you just pretend to use them as learning opportunities than you’re fooling yourself.
Addiction gives us enough opportunities to beat ourselves up without taking on extra challenges.
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| Posted in: Education Tags: addiction, cheating, commitments, decide, failure, fired, job, opportunity, relapse |
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One Response to “Failure or opportunity? Addiction and life lessons”Leave a Reply | |
I have this little saying in my head sometimes, ‘Let my failure turn me into something that is not a failure’