4 words I say when I fail.

Sometimes I fail.

And when I do, I say these four words:

This too shall post.

It used to be “This too shall pass,” but then I learned something about sharing your failures with people.

1. People can relate to your failures.
Chances are they’ve had their own. Chances are they thought they were the only ones. Chances are they know what you’re going through because they went through it too.

2. They can learn from your experience.
If you share honestly about your own failures, people can often avoid having the same thing happen to them. If you stepped in a hole and it hurt, it helps if you tell other people not to fall down that same hole.

The temptation, of course, is to only share your success. From the stage as a public speaker or from the mailbox as a neighbor, it’s much more comfortable to tell a story in which you made a wise decision. You look a little like a good guy. You win.

Fight this temptation.

We’re full up on leaders who only recount mistakes they made from 20 years ago.

We’ve got enough people on Facebook telling us about their perfect life.

We’ve got more celebrities crafting fictional reality lives than we can possibly stand.

What we’re missing is people who, when they fail, say “This too shall post.” We need people who, instead of dramatizing the failure or glamorizing it or oversharing in inappropriate ways, simply ask the question, “What did I learn in this experience that might help someone else?”

You don’t need a blog to “post” either. A post for you might mean coffee with a friend or a phone call to a family member. We all have the chance to post every day in a million different ways.

This too shall post.

It’s the new “This too shall pass.” And I’ll go first.

Several weeks ago, I found out that I lost 99% of all the Facebook fans of Stuff Christians Like. The group went from 10,000 people to 23. Facebook changed the rules of groups. There must have been something I was supposed to do in order to accommodate that change. I did not do what I was supposed to do. And so the group essentially disappeared. Why? I was lazy. I started to coast on a few of my social media platforms. I thought I had set them in motion, and that’s all I had to do.

You can’t coast with social media.

Lesson learned.

Starting again.

This too shall post.

Question:
What’s something your last mistake taught you?