IWSG

Posting the First Wednesday of every month, the Insecure Writer's Support Group, is the brainchild of Alex Cavanaugh. YOU can sign up HERE to participate.

Every month a question will be posed that may prompt you to share advice, insight, a personal experience or story. Remember, the question is optional. You can write about anything that relates to your writing journey.

Let's give a warm welcome to our co-hosts, Tamara Narayan, Pat Hatt, Patricia Lynne, Juneta Key, and Doreen McGettigan!

This month's question is: Have you given yourself permission to fail?

I almost failed to post today. Have I given myself permission to fail? Oh yeah. I may not like it, but the truth is (for me) I fail at writing all the time. Don't tell anyone but my first drafts always need a lot of work. Sometimes it takes multiple tries before I feel confident enough to let someone read it which, of course, invariably leads to more revisions, more edits. Yeah, I fail all the time. But so what? Although I don't remember it, I'm sure a fell down many times before I learned to walk or run. I know I fell down when I learned to ride my bike. And I know I didn't always catch a fish when I put out a line. Were those failures? You tell me. 

Is this hibiscus a failure?

There are a gazillion excellent quotes about failure on the net. I picked 20. 

1. “Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.”– C. S. Lewis
2. “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”– Samuel Beckett
3. “The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows.”– Buddha
4. “Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising every time we fail.”– Confucius
5. “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”– Thomas Edison
6. “A man may fail many times but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.”– John Burroughs
7. “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.”– J.K. Rowling
8. “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”– Albert Einstein
9. “When we give ourselves permission to fail, we, at the same time, give ourselves permission to excel.”– Eloise Ristad
10. “Failure isn’t fatal, but failure to change might be.”– John Wooden
11. “A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent in doing nothing.”– George Bernard Shaw
12. “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”– Michael Jordan
13. “You’ll always miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”– Wayne Gretzky
14. “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got.”– Mark Twain
15. “Remember that failure is an event, not a person.”– Zig Ziglar
16. "Failure isn't fatal, but failure to change might be" - John Wooden
17. “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” - Robert F. Kennedy
18.  “There is no failure except in no longer trying.” - Chris Bradford
19. “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” - Winston Churchill
20. “I'd rather be partly great than entirely useless.” - Neal Shusterman

Just so you know, this whole post is an epic fail! The question this month is, What is one valuable lesson you've learned since you started writing? My answer to that is, as long as I'm still breathing then failure is NOT the worst thing that can happen. 

Got a favorite quote? Ever failed at something only to succeed at a later time? What valuable lesson have you learned?