I was thinking about failure today, and remembering that the things that I often deem failures are successes to the other people that participated in them. The project may have ended in a hard place financially for me, but inspired a handful of others to completely change their lives and launch careers in the arts.
Is that a failure? I think what I'm often thinking is that the thing didn't end how I expected. Or how I felt I should have expected. Or maybe how I thought everyone around me expected.
But if the thing I expected didn't happen, and others got what they needed, maybe I expected the wrong thing? When I'm busy obsessing about something, I miss the moment where someone has found the thing they were looking for, and this is where the real value of the project lies.