quality of failure

Purpose in My Heart

Posted on April 13, 2021 by Kaylin Stravalli

I woke up one morning last week with a purpose in my heart. Do you ever have that feeling? The one that feels like some of the thousands of tiny pieces you’ve been trying to fit together finally fell into place in your heart while you slept? It’s a weird one, for sure, but also… one of the coolest.

It was like all the sleepless nights I have spent trying to figure things out, all the working dreams I have had, and all of the things (big and small) that I have done and accomplished over the past several years FINALLY paid some dividends.

There was no real Aha! moment. Nothing that I woke up thinking was new. In fact, it was a bunch of thoughts I have all the time. Wishes I make regularly. Dreams I dream every day and night. So what was different?

This feeling.

I woke with a purpose in my heart to do the things I have been wishing and hoping and praying for my whole life. I felt filled with the knowledge that I was meant for it. I felt certain that it was one of the reasons I was put on this planet, that it was my way to make this world just a little bit better place to be, and that somehow, some way it was going to give me the life I’ve always felt I was meant to live. I felt confident that I was ready to move forward.

Sacrifices, compromises, and a lot of time and sweat equity will be required, but I’m finally ready to make them. I’m finally ready to pursue the things that have long felt like pipe dreams, wishful thinking, or a child’s naïveté.

And when those thoughts creeped in…Who am I to do this? What makes me qualified? What if I fail? What if I make a fool of myself? I answered myself.

Why not me? I have the education, the experience, and the interest.

What if I never try, never just do the darn thing, never put myself out there? I would regret it, and I would always wonder what might have been. I would never know how it might have changed the course of my life in ways big and small.

And honestly, I need to find a way to get back some of the qualities of the girl that I was growing up because that girl beat to her own drum and did not give a rip if it didn’t make sense to other people. It made sense to her; it made her happy; and that’s all that mattered.

Even if I fail or it doesn’t work out or it leads me down a path I never expected, at least I will know I did so by stepping out on a limb, hoping it can bear the weight of a lifetime of dreams. I will have done so trying. I will have learned and grown and ended up somewhere new. My Quality of Failure will get an A+. And that is a much better life than playing it safe and always wondering where it would have led me.

So what is the nagging idea that resurfaces in your sleep and in your daydreams? What distracts you when you’re busy doing all the things you “have to” do and makes you think, I could be doing so many other things, like ______ and is always the thing that fills in the blank.

If I were a betting woman, I’d bet something just popped into your head. What is it? Are you ready to listen to that voice yet? Are the pieces starting to fall into place in your heart?

Maybe they are, or maybe you still need some time to work your way around it before you can zero in on that thing in the center. This process is good and necessary. It leads to the Aha! moments that feel a lot more like the truth you’ve always known making itself perfect clear – in neon.

Posted on February 14, 2014 by Kaylin Stravalli

Fall 2012 I spent a semester in grad school at Eastern Illinois University where I met and had class with Dr. Terri Fredrick. Since then, I have worked on a project with her and a few of my classmates and she has become Terri to me. This post is not about how I came to know Terri; about our project, or about how I left grad school (well kind of but roll with me for a bit before that comes up again). It’s about the most valuable lesson I learned from her and how it carried over into my life.

Terri introduced to our class an element of our final grade that I had never heard of before and was instantly intrigued by. She called it “quality of failure.” She encouraged us to take risks with our writing, to think outside the box, and to be creative and to fail – at least in her class where it was safe to do so. If things didn’t turn out exactly or even remotely close to what we’d imagined, hoped, and planned, well, that was okay because that 5% safety net of encouragement and freedom to fail was there for us. It wouldn’t break our grade or our confidence to “fail” at something we were experimenting with.

The concept was taken on by each of my fellow classmates with a range of enthusiasm and willingness to step outside our training to “give the teacher what he or she wants” to get the desired “A” on our work. I have to admit I didn’t jump into it with as much as enthusiasm as I would have liked to or would now given the chance. However, I have carried this concept over into my personal life and made up for lost time by taking risks and giving myself the freedom to fail. Of course, no one is grading me on how well I live my life or how badly I tank when following an idea or a dream, but it has opened my eyes to seeing failure in a different light.

Just because something doesn’t turn out the way we’d imagined, hoped, or planned doesn’t mean it was all for naught. In fact, I would argue that some of the most valuable lessons learned come from our biggest failures – that is, if we’ve done some quality failing and are able to see the forest through the trees when it seems that nothing is working out.

Take, for instance, my semester in grad school. (Told you I’d get to it.) Notice I said semester. A. Singular. One. That’s because that is all it took for me to realize that the path of a traditional scholar was not the path for me. No, I didn’t fail out. My grades were just fine. I passed. I did well. I could have kept going. I could have completed the two-year program on a full ride scholarship and gotten my master’s in Literature with an emphasis on Creative Writing, sure. Would I have thrived? No. I found out that going forward with my original plan to graduate college early, get my master’s, go on for my PhD, and become a college professor was not going to make me happy or fulfill me the way I had once thought. My original plan was a failure in the sense that I only accomplished about a fourth of it. Was it a mistake to go to grad school? No. Was it a mistake to leave? Some might think so, but I don’t. I made the best decision for me at both points and accepted the saying about “best laid plans” as the gospel truth.

Like I said, I’m sure there are those people who thought, still think, or will think after reading this that I failed in some way by making the decision I did to leave grad school and was/am crazy to do so given the opportunity I’d been granted. That’s okay. I chalk it up to “quality of failure.” I was willing to leave the comfort and safety of a two-year master’s program to “wallow in ambiguity,” as my classmates, Terri, and me came to call the times when we trudge our way through a bunch of not knowing to a solid conclusion.

The point is – we have to be willing to take a risk or two (like I mentioned in my last post Eyes Wide Open), to fall on our faces, and then dust ourselves off and try again, to fail sometimes in order to gain anything. We may not gain what we’d intended and it may not be obvious to anyone from the outside looking in, but I guarantee you we will have gained something out of what we failed at or lost.

Perspective. Self-respect. Freedom. Confidence (odd but it happens). Answers. Adventures. Opportunities. And quite possibly could have saved ourselves from a lot of regrets.

Whatever it may be it will have been worth the failure because we will have learned and gained things we never would have without that experience. Who knows how that will help us in the future? It could make us a better person, more empathetic, more compassionate. It could help someone else. It could land us a job. It could pay off in any number of unexpected ways.

But – and this is a big but – if we don’t put ourselves out there, if we don’t risk failing at anything, if we aren’t willing to wallow in ambiguity for even just a little while, if we never take into account the quality of our failure, of the positive things that are gleaned from the negative – we will remain stagnant. Unmoved. Unmotivated. We won’t learn anything and will have closed ourselves off to and missed so many opportunities to grow and not even realize it.

That’s no way to live. Not to really live. So I challenge you:

Take a risk. Assess your quality of failure. Wallow in ambiguity. And reap the benefits you never knew you didn’t have.