Celebrating Failure

This past semester, I failed at changing my photography work to be more remote. My goal was to do more work in Gainesville and not drive 4 hours south to do all of my work in Naples. I missed a lot of opportunities and I am not totally happy about that. For example, I should have been promoting Valentine’s Day photoshoots as well as graduation shoots for college students, but instead I would drive down to Naples and shoot there. I still got to work on my hobby, but I failed at opening more doors for my photography. I still love what I do and I just wanted to expand my business a little more. I have had a hard time getting out of the usual funk of working in Naples and I am going to try harder next semester with this. I do realize my failure with expanding this semester and I learned that I need to be more open to new experiences. Sometimes I stick with what is normal to me and I lack a sense of newness, but I am going to work on it. I learned that if I really want to succeed in my goal of expanding, I need to try harder and work with a mindset to expand and grow. I think that failure helps one grow, no matter the circumstance. I do believe that you need to fail many times before you succeed. Just like I learned in Scott Adams book on failing and succeeding, the process and journey is important and each step in between matters, whether that includes failing or not. I usually handle failure with the wrong mindset. Sometimes failure emotionally drains me and I take it as a stopping point on the road to my goal. This is not the mindset that I should have, though, and I’ve learned a lot about that during this course. This class has definitely changed my perspective on failure. I have failed many times in my business idea, but I understand that those failures are just steps to my success at the end of this. I have learned a lot about dealing with failure and using it to step back up and fight toward my goal. I also think that I am definitely more likely to take a risk because of this class. Failure does not scare me, like it did months ago. I am more aware of the benefits of failure and know that I can succeed even after loads of failure.