Are you human?

Then you will have Off days

Failure is just growth in wolf's clothing - Robin Sharma

I was reading through my notepad several hours ago, and I stumbled on a quote I wrote out of Robin Sharma's book, The 5AM Club, and I thought it would be the perfect message to share this week.

There are a lot of lessons to learn from Robin Sharma's book, and this one stood out for me particularly. And here it is: Failure is growth in wolf's clothing.

Last week, I implored us to live beyond our feelings, but it is imperative to balance that message out with this.

As long as we are human, and still in this imperfect body, we cannot completely be out of touch with our feelings. Even the most turned on human has off days. You just won't be there when they are experiencing their off days. They record stupendous growth because they ensure their on-days are more than off days.

The body is imperfect, the flesh is weak, almost always weaker than our will until we are trained, so there are times we will fail to live beyond our feelings, there are times we will disappoint ourselves.

There are times we won't show up for ourselves when we are supposed to, times we'll feel the whole world is against us, crashing on us. Sure, we know we don't have it all together, but there are times we will feel it deeply.

There are times we'll make silly mistakes, times we will go with our feelings instead of our head, and we won't even realize until we get to the endpoint and then discover we have been goofing all the while.

There are times we will miss the mark, fail to hit the hoop, fail to pass the exam or ace the results. There are times we will go with all the logic and still mess up even. There are times we will trust our gut so much and cry bitterly at the end because, "We should have known better."

These times will come, no matter what point in life you are in right now. Broke, rich, jobless, earning in dollars, lonely, surrounded by love, genius, hardworker, you name it. These times will come. This is why it is imperative that you define what failure is, and Robin Sharma's perspective beats all else.

Failure is growth, but in wolf's clothing.

When you start seeing every down moment as an opportunity to learn something new, to discover something different about yourself, an opportunity to gather data for what has happened, an opportunity to grow through the cracks and come out beautiful, you'd not beat yourself up as hard as you used to.

Failure is not a chance to show your true self as many people interpret it to be. They fail to show up one time, and then they feel terrible and wonder if they'd ever be serious with their lives. They fail the exam and wonder if they are even as intelligent as they think. They make a mistake in a relationship, and they start to feel dejected and think they aren't good people. They give in to their feelings and then they feel like such a mess that it spirals down to everything in their lives.

This is the wrong attitude. Don't let this be you. You are only permitted to have such an attitude if you're not human and if you believe you're perfect in your imperfect body.

In fact, it is pride that makes you take up that kind of attitude. Pride in that you think you're perfect and you shouldn't fail. You think you have grown all you need to and don't need any more growing.

If you don't think that way, then you have no business feeling dejected and defining your person based off that failure and off-day.

See failure as Robin Sharma defined them. Growth in wolf's clothing. Wolf's Clothing because they'd be painful. They'd bite and sting hard, but they will make you better. They will expand you and enlarge you, depending on how you interpret them.

So on off days, ensure you learn something new out of it. See it as a growth opportunity and truly do that; grow.

In the final analysis, it is important to stress this. Don't make off days the rule. If wolves bite every time, there will be nothing left of you to grow. Off days are the exception. Remember, the idea is to have more On-days than you have Off-days. The extent of your success will be measured by the excess of impeccable days (On-days) over Off-days.

Cheers 🥂

To your growth,

Abiola Okunsanya,

Handzinspired.