My first bicycle was pink.
After some upgrades and a paint job, my bike and I became inseparable. I rode that bike everywhere. There were vast fields to the west of my childhood home where I could ride that bike into the foothills of the Oquirrh Mountains.
On a particular afternoon, I came racing home from somewhere. I remember having feelings of elation though the reason for my abundant happiness has been lost to time.
I was riding my bike down the hill by my home, pumping my fists in the air — neither hand on the handlebars. Momentum steered my bike in a straight course right up to the instant I hit some loose gravel in the street.
Faster than I could react, my front tire flipped hard to the right and I found myself flying through the air. Somehow, I got my left arm in front of me before I hit the road. I slid perhaps ten or fifteen feet with my left palm, elbow, and left knee pressed firmly against the road.
Incredibly, my head never hit the ground which was good because bike helmets were not commonplace at that time.
No bones broke and no stitches were required. I did have some gnarly-looking road rash on my elbow for several weeks following the incident and I remember my mom having to pick and dig rocks out from under my skin.
It was the most spectacular crash I ever had on that bike, but it certainly wasn’t the last.
That wreck taught me a valuable lesson: some times were safer than others to ride without hands on the handlebars. I also learned how bad it hurts to have someone dig rocks out of your skin.
Of course, those aren’t lessons I anticipated learning that day in that way. Otherwise, I probably would have kept my hands on the handlebars. Physics is a brutal teacher sometimes and often when least expected.
We don’t often think of achieving failure. However, when failure becomes a mode of learning and progressing, it is an achievement of sorts. It’s the failure that results in giving up that’s the only real failure.
After that crash, I didn’t give up riding. I healed, I learned some important lessons, and I rode again. That failure wasn’t an end for me. It was a checkpoint. I knew there was freedom that came from riding a bike, and that meant enough to me to get back on the bike as soon as my injuries had healed.
The same holds true well beyond childhood scrapes and bruises. In life, we hit gravel we didn’t see coming often. We get thrown off course. Sometimes, we walk away with nothing more than a few scrapes. Other times, we feel like we’ve crashed so hard that getting up seems too painful or even seems impossible.
Just like that wreck, though, failure isn’t always the disaster it seems in the moment. Sometimes, it’s the thing that teaches us what we wouldn’t have learned otherwise — the hard, unavoidable lessons that can shape us. And if we let it, failure becomes part of the ride rather than the reason we stop pedaling.
We spend so much time chasing success that we rarely stop to consider what happens when we achieve failure: when our best efforts don’t work, when the plan falls apart, when the outcome we were afraid of becomes reality. Does failure mean we’ve reached an end — the end — or does it open doors we never would have seen otherwise?
Kathryn Stockett’s debut novel, The Help, was rejected 60 times before it finally got published. Many authors would have given up after the first dozen rejections, but she kept revising, submitting, and improving. When the book was finally published, it spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and became an Academy Award-winning film.
Vera Wang was once a competitive figure skater with dreams of making the U.S. Olympic team. She trained relentlessly, but despite her best efforts, she failed to qualify. Heartbroken, she shifted her focus to fashion, eventually becoming one of the most influential bridal designers in history. If she had succeeded in figure skating, the world may never have seen her groundbreaking designs.
Crashing my bike didn’t lead me to some great discovery, but the point is that there are lessons to learn from our failures. Rarely do those lessons have widespread impact on others as in the eventual successes of Stockett and Wang. Most of the time, they become the vast array of experiences that make us who we are.
Failure isn’t just something to endure — it’s something to use. It’s a checkpoint, not a conclusion. Stockett didn’t let 60 rejections define her writing career. Vera Wang didn’t let a missed Olympic dream keep her from finding another path. They weren’t chasing failure, but when they achieved it, they used the momentum to push them toward something else. They adapted and learned, then they moved forward.
That’s the choice we all face.
We will fail. At something. At many things. We will hit gravel we didn’t see coming, and sometimes, we’ll go flying. The question isn’t if we’ll fail. It’s what we’ll do next.
I don’t recall thinking about not getting back on that bike. My friends and I rode our bikes everywhere, and I instinctively knew that not getting back on that bike meant missing out on a lot of opportunities.
So, when you achieve failure, whenever it comes, the big question is what will you do with it?
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