Failure

"A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart". - Goethe

I have failed over and over again.

No one likes to talk about it. The taboo subject at the dinner table – something for private admonishment.

Although for some their failure is far more public; broadcast across the world for all to see and laugh.

Look at them, they have failed. The business, the actor, the politician. The more public the rise, the sweeter the fall.

Yet those who laugh in glee are never forced to face their failure; either their ambition is so little that their failure is of no consequence or their admonishment is in private – a courtesy they fail to give to others.

I have often thought there could be few worse fates than to face failure in the way of politicians.

Traipsed out into a leisure centre at the darkest hours to hear what your fellow citizens think of you.

Few would empathise with the public failure of Liz Truss. Yet I can’t help but do so.

There are a million mantras on failure. All of them essentially boiling down to keep trying.

In the past I would see my failure to meet my goal as an excuse to cower away but in reality it is the opposite.

Only in failure can you persist.

The ever-prescient German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in his classic Faust, writes: “A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.”

For me, there is no greater mantra in life than that.

How you perceive the world is what the world will give you; if you only see failure and despair, the world will be a hostile place.

Yet if you carry yourself with hope, love, and an open heart, the world can’t help itself but be a beauty.