We fail.
All of us fail.
All the time.
Some of us fail more than most.
I’ve failed at every single thing I’ve tried.
I catch fewer waves than I paddle for.
I’ve lost cases in court.
I wrote books I never sold.
Launched businesses that fell apart.
Trusted friends who robbed me.
Still haven’t caught a baseball at a Padres game.
We fail because we try.
New things. Old things. Things we think we know but don’t.
We fail by daring.
And that’s the point.
Those failures are real. And they’re spectacular.
We all fail, and that’s okay.
Yeah, that’s right. It’s okay to fail.
It’s more than okay.
Failure is how we learn.
But failure has a price: the shame tax.
Our culture celebrates the win but not the wounds.
It praises champions but skips the road that broke them into shape.
The grind, the losses, the stumbles—we cut those from the story.
Instead, it sees failure as a moral flaw. A personal weakness.
Friends, partners, investors, or allies distance themselves.
And now, people film, post, and mock failures as entertainment.
Those of us who trade on reputation don’t fail out loud.
My fellow lawyers and I seldom, if ever, share war stories of the cases we’ve lost.
Business tycoons sweep their bad deals under the rug like they never happened.
Finance bros walk around like they’ve never had a bad quarter.
Tech bros are racing toward AI supremacy like it won’t push humans to the curb.
Silence on our failures hurts us.
Stigmatizing failure makes us miss out on each other’s lessons.
Worse, it stops us from making our own mistakes—pulling meaning from them, and building better.
Most of us imagine life and success as a staircase: step up, step up, step up, arrive.
It’s not.
The staircase isn’t real.
We built that myth to make the journey look tidy.
Growth is more like:
Dip your toes.
Leap.
Miss.
Get up.
Jump.
Crash.
Groan.
Sit there a while.
Lick your wounds.
Think.
Crawl sideways through the dirt.
Scrape the knee.
Break some bones.
Get up.
Try again—but with better aim.
Repeat until you make it.
Or walk away.
Start over.
Try something else.
Success comes from failing forward.
Failure is just feedback wrapped in pain.
It’s the hard tuition of trying to build or do anything worth living for.
You learn what matters when all the distractions burn off.
Where your voice shakes.
Where it holds.
Failing forward is to reframe our failures. To harvest them. It’s letting the fall shape us, not shrink us.
It’s keeping the faith after the lights go out.
Failing forward means stop pretending you’re unbreakable—and becoming unstoppable.
Thanks for reading.
–Alberto.
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