Failure to launch

If you’re a romantic or a woman, there’s a solid chance you’re already familiar with the movie, Failure to Launch, and the plot line of a hot, successful, single man in his forties, who’s failed to move out of his parents house, despite having the means to do so. As the title suggests, this man has “failed” to launch out of his parents home. If you hate the word failure like the majority of people, take a deep breathe and get ready to dive in to why “failure” isn’t so bad and also what “failure” can tell us about ourselves.

Picture in your mind something you’ve never done before. Perhaps you’ve failed to visit Italy, failed to purchase a yacht, or failed to pet the Tigers in Thailand. But what if you didn’t want to do those things in the first place? Would you call it a failure? Probably not, but the result is still the same. You didn’t do something.

There’s an old saying, “If you don’t try, you can’t fail,” or is it “You can’t fail if you don’t try?” Honestly, I’m not sure. But either way, the result is the same. You get to be the person that holds your head up high and proudly states, “I didn’t fail at that thing, I just didn’t want it/focus on it/go after it.” I’m all about a good reframe, but I also know that a rose by any other name would still smell just as sweet.

I tend to buck the trends and really embrace failure. Failure means I did a bold and brave thing and I learned from it. Failure means I didn’t do a bold and brave thing, so I could do other bold and brave things. Failure is neither good nor bad, it just is. And it has a lot to tell us about ourselves.

All those things I didn’t go after, those failures to launch, well sometimes I regret those things. Like all those trips I didn’t take that I now can’t take, because COVID. But mostly those “failures to launch” are just me telling the universe “not now.” Those failures to launch are choices I made and doors I closed, whether unintentionally or on purpose. As the other old saying goes, “Timing is everything.” And in the words of Maya Angelou, “When you know better, you do better.”

What have you put the pause on launching? What have you avoided launching, so that you could do other bold and brave things? Mostly importantly, what will your first bold and brave step look like as you get ready to launch?