Savor the Success

Someone at STS once encouraged me to Accept Greatness. Today, I was reading about blogging, and one of the tips recommended "embracing failure."

It REALLY resonated. After all, the past few weeks haven't been my most successful. I won't recount ALL of the failures, but ....

* My hosting company deleted my entire website.

* I worked my rear off (well, I really worked it ON considering how much desk chair sitting was involved... but who's looking at my butt anyway?) to write an essay for NYT Modern Love, submitted it, and was rejected within just TWO days.

* I thought I was going to be quoted in the November issue of a national magazine. I bought it, opened it and learned that I was cut from the story.

I could go on and on, but the short story is that my path to success has been all uphill lately. A glass half empty person might count up all of these little failures and say, "Time to give up."

That's why I love the idea of embracing failure. What can I learn from these problems?

Well, when my site was deleted by my hosting company, embracing failure meant that it was the perfect time to do something that I'd been thinking about doing for a long time--switch over to a Wordpress platform. I've wanted to do this for a while because it would allow me to have a comments area, organize my blogs into categories and do many other cool things. I was putting it off because it seemed like a lot of work. But hell, once I had no website to speak of, it seemed like the perfect time to enbrace failure and go for it.

So with a huge amount of help from Marc Stedman (aka The STS Moderator Pup) I took the plunge. And now: ta-dah.... I'm on wordpress. You can comment on my blogs! You can read related posts!! You can find my STS blogs!!!

It's so cool. I'm so happy that I embraced this particular failure that I'm looking for other failures to embrace. The NYT doesn't want my essay? I can find some outlet that DOES want it! That one magazine cut me from that story? I'll just get quoted in a different and better one!!!

With failure comes a new direction and with a new direction comes a better future.

Alisa Bowman

www.projecthappilyeverafter.com