So I did it.

30 posts in 30 days. I guess I expected balloons to drop or confetti or something, but no big deal. I know I did it, and so do my seven readers, so there. Victory.

But I almost didn’t write this post tonight.

Really.

Not because I didn’t have time or I didn’t have anything to say, but I was intentionally going to stop at 29 days, and see if anyone noticed. But then my wife told me I was being a dumb ass, and that I worked so hard to get here, that I would be a fool not to complete it. I know she was right, but the thought of stopping one day short came to me as I was coming home from work tonight.

What happens when you set a goal and you come up short? Not only that, how many times have we not attempted something because we were afraid to fail?

Well, to answer that first part, nothing. The answer is nothing happens.

If you set a goal for yourself, that goal is yours, and yours alone. If you fail to achieve it, then you just take a step back, analyze what happened, and make a plan to try again.

Or you don’t try again. It’s your call.

If you fail to reach your objective, there is no law saying you have to try it again. That’s up to you. One time had had a plan to run every morning for a month. The rules I set was I had to run every day, first thing in the morning and it had to be outside. This was a terrible idea.

The problem with this plan was it was April, and May in New Hampshire can give you any type of weather. It was miserable, and I gave up within ten days. I never tried that again because I decided that it was foolish to run every day, so I quit and never looked back.

Now, when I quit smoking, that was a different plan altogether. I came up with a number of plans and I failed each time… except for one. My last attempt I was successful and reached my goal, and that’s all that mattered. Not the two thousand times I tried before, but that one time that I did what I set out to do.

The moral to the story is if you challenge yourself, and you don’t meet your goal, you didn’t fail anything. You’ve only experienced a setback and It’s up to you to decide what you want to do next.

Which brings me to my second point. The fear of trying something because you think you’re going to fail. Here’s something for you to consider… There is no such thing as failure.

Well, not entirely . I mean the only way you can fail is if you get killed trying to reach your goal. For instance, if your goal is to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and survive, and instead you get killed, it’s fair to say you failed.

Almost anything else you attempt, but you are unsuccessful in achieving your goal, is just a setback. You always have options on what you want to do next. Reflect on it, learn from it, and move on. But don’t stress about it. As long as it didn’t kill you, you’re still okay.

It’s been said that success and failure lie along the same road, it’s just that success lies farther down the road than failure. I believe this, but I also think that there is more failure past success, because all failure is temporary and all glory is fleeting.

As for me, I was successful in this endeavor. 30 posts in 30 days. I hope you enjoyed them as much as I enjoyed writing them, and I hope you didn’t need as many rum and cokes as I did in order to get through them.

And now that we’ve established I’m capable of publishing blog posts regularly, it’s time for me to get to work.