Welcome To The Community

Together, we’ll dive deep and find the strength to never give up because Great Things Take Time.

Many of you might remember when I poked fun at being referenced as having a former job as a NASA contractor. Today, I have nothing but gratitude for that reference because it inspired this newsletter.

If you were forwarded this email, you can subscribe and join the Great Things Take Time Community to get content from me every Monday.

Here's what's in today's email

• Failure IS an Option

• Moments with Maurice

• What's Got Me Smilin'

Failure IS an Option

You’re going to fail. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but it’s going to happen. Some of us don’t see things as failures; we see them as mere missteps. For others, something small is going to feel so catastrophic that it’s going to knock us on our asses. 

And for those of you whose work IS life and death, I genuinely don’t know what to say but thank you. Thank you for allowing the rest of us the ability to live a life that is free from worry about failure. 

I’m sure you all can at least think of one thing that you might have overreacted to where something felt more serious than it was. Totally get it; I’ve been there. In the moment of failure, all that you can think of is the failure itself and what that means for you. You start to create stories as to who you are as a person and what this means for you. 

If you aren’t familiar with the phrase, “Failure is not an option,” it is associated with Gene Kranz in the movie Apollo 13. While Kranz was the real-life lead flight director for NASA’s Apollo 13 flight, he was not the originator of the line. It’s actually movie magic that came from the scriptwriters after interviewing Jerry C. Bostick, the Flight Dynamics Officer for Apollo 13, to better understand the mindset of mission control.

“No, when bad things happened, we just calmly laid out all the options, and failure was not one of them. We never panicked, and we never gave up on finding a solution.”

Hmm… he’s definitely onto something.

Recently, I’ve gotten caught up in the same old patterns I had when my grandmother died. I am too focused on everything but the people I care about the most: what matters most to me in the world. When my grandmother died, I failed. I had structured my life in a way that I didn’t feel like I had the energy for her. The last time I spoke to her to cancel on dinner, she told me that she hoped I would be able to invest more time in the people I cared about and who cared about me. After the initial shock and regret wore off, I scanned my life (sometimes obsessively) for mistakes that I had made. Things that I could have changed to avoid getting to what I felt like was a huge failure.

Failure comes at a variety of different levels:

We lift weights to failure- to discover our threshold and where we can push our limits.

We say dumb things and have tough conversations with people that don’t go how we planned in our heads to figure out the intricacies of our relationships.

We start newsletters to connect deeper with our community and mess up links, deadlines, and content. 

We forget things we’ve promised we’d do, leaving us to better understand what systems we need in place to help us. Or we just get an honest look that we may have taken on too much.

Take lifting to failure; in the simplest way, when we get to the point where we cannot lift a weight one more time, we literally fail. In that moment, we can look at it in a logical way: we are not strong enough to do more; this is the current limit of our bodies, and this is the baseline that we can improve from. We also look at what caused failure, as it could be something simple as not enough sleep, improper diet, lack of hydration, ineffective training, or a myriad of other reasons. 

In this instance, failure isn’t a bad thing; we have to fail to know our limits. If we didn’t, we’d go on without clear goals, just floating around space. Failure can absolutely be an option, and a good one at that, if we’re able to take that information and flip it around to examine where we went wrong.

So, if you haven’t already, I want you to consider a time when you recently felt like you’ve failed. Why do you feel that way? Now, more logically, what are the things that caused the failure? Have you taken on too much, chosen things that don’t contribute to your health and wellness, made an uninformed decision, or something else? Or maybe it was just a routine stirring of your oxygen tanks (if you get this reference, then you didn’t need the background on this newsletter).

Write it down as if you were creating an after-action report, and it needs to be recreated and simulated. What were the steps that led to this failure? No detail is too small.

Now, look back on it with the clarity of hindsight, that crystal clear 20/20 vision. Remove the emotion, remove the feelings, and remove the stories. “I’m just not good enough” is not an answer. You’re human, and there is something that you’ve missed and can improve upon.

Whatever you’re left with is your directions to learn from failure. When we remove emotions from our failures, we’re left with a blueprint for growth.

Feel like sharing what you learned? Put it in the comments on the post above, you never know who is struggling with the exact same thing.

Moments with Maurice

If you only pause to reflect on your life for one moment today, do it now.

How can you care less about others’ opinions? How can you keep it from impacting you?

When you’re on track to care less about other’s opinions and listen to your own thoughts, you find that the people around you are in sync and supportive of you, you feel an excited and happy kind of stress, and you’re not afraid of the future or failure because you know what your options are.

Conversely, when you’re too caught up in others’ opinions, you get heated by every comment (even small inconsequential ones), and you can’t make decisions without input from others, but you also find yourself making rash decisions that you may come to regret.  

We’re human, and it happens to everyone, but where do you want to be?

Because no matter what, there is always something to smile about.

On My Plate This Week

Protein at home, homemade pasta, and tacos from Hudson Taco.

Not My Cars (but I can still drool over them)

The yellow Porsche 964 is a friend’s car before it goes through an RWB build in the next year. This essentially means they will cut up the Porsche. There is only one person (Akira Nakai) who can do this and he flies in and cuts up your Porsche in front of you (third image).

The last two photos are of what felt like a once in a life time opportunity getting to see the SSC Tuatara. If you think it looks fast, well, that’s because it is, reaching speeds of 295 MPH.

Remember:

-Adrian