Redefining Failure and Success

Recently I’ve been thinking about failure, and what we consider failure to be. As writers, we might see failure in not writing as much as we want. As students, failure might be not passing a class. As human beings, we often define failure by what we haven’t accomplished.

But what is failure, truly?

Failure is the perception of not being successful. Key word: perception.

But let’s flip it. What is success?

Success is the perception of accomplishment. But whose perception? Yours? Mine? A friend’s? A parent’s?

Thomas Edison once said, “I haven’t failed. I have just found ten thousand ways it won’t work.”

Edison was right. It’s not failure when you find new ways to move forward.

During my first semester of college, I took a class because I was thinking of double majoring. It was a linguistics course for a degree in writing. Now, I’ll be the first to admit I don’t have the best grammar (thank you, Grammarly), but this class felt like a master’s in linguistics. The professor talked fast. The pace was relentless. The assignments? Dissertations in disguise.

And I failed. Literally. I didn’t pass the class. And it was agonizing. I went into a spiral of doubt and regret that felt like I was never really good at anything and what was the point of even trying. It wasn’t until I redefined failure that I understood what it really ment to not pass that class.

Up to that point, I’d earned A’s and B’s in all my community college courses. I’d gone from nearly failing out of nursing school to being invited into an honor society and getting accepted into an honors college. Then I failed my first class at said honors college.

But did I actually fail?

Whose definition are we using? The professor’s? Mine? Yours? My parents’?

I didn’t fail. I gained knowledge that I otherwise wouldn’t have gotten without that experience. I don’t need a degree in writing to write. I don’t need someone else’s validation of my skills to be successful. All I need is to reframe what failure means.

I will have failed when I have given up. For as long as I keep trying, I will not fail.

The truth is that we put a lot of pressure on success.

➡ “I’ll be successful when I’ve finished my book.”

➡ “I’ll be successful when my book is published.”

➡ “I’ll be successful if I have straight A’s through college.”

➡ “I’ll be successful when I have 10,000 followers.”

➡ “I’ll be successful when people know who I am.”

We act like success is a locked door and we’re just trying to find the one right key. But what if it’s not? What if success is a hallway, and every so-called ‘failure’ is just a turn we had to take to find the right room?

Failing as a writer often comes down to impossible expectations. Having the perfect novel is one. Writing a novel in a single month is another, unless you dedicate every waking hour to it, or you’re part of NaNoWriMo, or Novel November as it’s called now.

NaNoWriMo has inspired and united writers, and yes, some good novels came out of it. But it also created a heavy expectation: that you should be able to produce a substantial novel in 30 days. The original goal was simple, help writers face the blank page without fear. In that sense, it succeeded. But it also failed, because it left many writers believing they should keep up that pace for every book. And when they can’t? They believe they’ve failed again.

A lot of the time, people will shame you for admitting that you’ve failed. This is a societal construct we’ve carried since elementary school. The verbal chastisements from teachers, the pressure from parents insisting we should be better, the shame of watching friends excel while we struggled—together these experiences shaped a harsh inner critic that treats failure as shameful.

Undoing years of that conditioning isn’t easy. But every time you feel like you’ve failed, ask yourself whether that’s true, or if you’re seeing through the lens of that hypercritical inner voice that never stops insisting you’ve fallen short.

Here’s the thing: that voice doesn’t get the final say. You do. The more you practice questioning it, the quieter it gets. And little by little, failure stops being shame and starts being information, feedback you can use to move forward.

Edison didn’t measure himself against society’s yardstick. He didn’t call ten thousand attempts a waste; he called them progress. That’s the lesson. Failure isn’t the opposite of success. It’s part of the process, part of the learning.

Success isn’t a title, a grade, a paycheck, or a follower count. It isn’t something handed down by professors, parents, or publishers. Success is whatever leaves you knowing you moved forward in a way that feels true to you.

So don’t let the world tell you what failing looks like. And don’t let it tell you what success should be. Define it for yourself. Because the only real failure is giving up, and the only real success is building a life and a body of work that feels like yours.

Hit comment below and tell me: what does failure mean to you? When have you felt it most, and what did you take from it?