Thomas A. Edison: “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” “Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

How do you handle yourself when you are thinking you failed at anything?
.
( 1 ) Do you totally give up on yourself and never try again and be discouraged or just forget
about it completely?

( 2 ) Do you take the detour and get to the road to success no matter how long it takes and feel like you accomplished something?

Tough question without a little more context for me so I'll apply it to weight management. I feel like I haven't "failed" unless I abandon ship and don't bother using any of the techniques I've learned to do so.

Having read GOAD pretty thoroughly and had success with WW from the start, I haven't stopped in the few years I've been doing this. That is to say I don't consider that at any time I've "failed". I may have gone off my plan for a day or two, but really no more than that. Once I started seeing the benefits of life in a smaller body, I realized I'd rather do what it takes to live that way than go back to my eating and drinking habits from 'back in the day'.

I will say that the lessons from WW and weight management sometimes guide me now in other aspects of my life as well. I can more readily break tasks that seem overwhelming into smaller chunks and just keep working away at them instead of just giving up on them. It's not universal for me, but it's a more viable path to success than it used to be for some things with me.

How do you handle yourself when you are thinking you failed at anything?
.
( 1 ) Do you totally give up on yourself and never try again and be discouraged or just forget
about it completely?

I spent about 15 years brooding. Like a snowball downhill, my defeats were accumulating, failures in one area were bleeding into others. I gained 100lbs.

Unlike a lot of people, I weighed myself regularly all the way up to 285 lbs, like I was waiting for the upward trend to magically stop. I had a fantasy of losing weight but fear of failure kept me from pursuing it. If I tried and failed, I’d lose lose the comfort of my fantasy. Didn’t forget though. I was stuck in my rut, head down pushing on but filled with dread.

( 2 ) Do you take the detour and get to the road to success no matter how long it takes and feel like you accomplished something?

Don’t consider myself a religious person, but in a particular moment of despair, I was delivered. No other way to put it. Like a movie running in reverse, the snowball started rolling uphill, getting smaller.

I eventually found my way to the gym. That’s where I learned the power of incrementalism. I think I’m genetically wired for tenacity. Taken too far it’s just stubbornness, but tenacity and incrementalism together are powerful. It’s how I made goal weight and stay there.

Sometimes after experiencing a defeat/failure, I try to sit with the frustration and disappointment for a few days rather than immediately trying to pump myself up for the next step. I feel like if I move on too quickly I’m not really dealing with the loss and it just sorta builds in the back ground. At the same time, I have to remind myself not to get stuck in that down place and that at a certain point I’m gonna need to bootstrap it and move on to the next challenge. This gets easier with practice. I feel like I spent a lot of time in my life glossing over the dark stuff without ever dealing with it and eventually it just found its way to the surface in unhealthy ways.