We fail because we give up, and because we perceive our giving up to be the wrong move for us. Here’s what I mean – there are times when we give up because we just don’t have the skills to do something at this point in our lives. That was water skiing for me. No matter how many times I tried, I just couldn’t get myself up out of the water. It took a few days of being dragged under the water before I came to the inescapable conclusion that it just wasn’t going to happen. I could have understood it to be failure, but I chose to see it at being successful at avoiding drowning by speed boat. I accepted that it wasn’t my thing, and chose to focus on my ability as a driver of the boat rather than as a potential anchor being dragged behind it.

How many times do we keep trying to do something at which we probably won’t succeed because we think we need to do this particular thing, most likely because people like us do it? When we can’t let go to our attachment to being a water skier, we become an anchor who thinks he is a water skier. We feel like a failure because we are trying to be something we are not. Is that really failure, or is it succeeding at living into who we authentically are?