The Great Day Of Failure 2020

If you have read here for a bit, you know that (as any good independent principality), we here at The FortyFive have our own pantheon of holidays which we celebrate, days that are as meaningful (or more) as any of the national holidays that appear on lesser, "other" calendars.

Today is August 2nd, or  Failure Day - hereafter known as The Great Day of Failure (sounds more majestic, does it not?).

The Great Day of Failure commemorates the day in 2005  when The Firm, the real estate company that I and a friend had founded, was dissolved due to the fact that we were not at all successful financially and needed to do something else.

If you have never failed a business, or had the exquisite pleasure of realizing that your financial decisions have put you and your family at significant risk and that if you are extremely lucky, you can find a position in an industry you swore you would never go back to - well, I will not tell you that you have not lived, but I will say that you have spared yourself a very peculiar type of humiliation.

So once a year, I celebrate not only this failure, but all the failures of the past year  - not because of the failures themselves per se, but because in many cases failures in fact represent the willingness to try something different and new and it did not go as well as intended.

This year, of course, we celebrate my failure in my work position which led me to a whole new side of my industry and, from what I can see right now, ultimately a very different way of life.  We also have at least one yogurt failure, two cheese failures, a rather lackluster response to my lawn restoration attempts, my (in process but most likely) continued attempt to try to grow corn and most beans when really I should be growing black eyed peas and sweet potatoes, my on-line attempt to do Italian, and (through no fault of our own) our failure to go to Italy due to The Plague of 2020.

For me, this has become a helpful exercise in looking back over the past year, realizing that failures do happen, and rather than letting them collect all through the year and become something I gnaw over in my mind time and again, just let everything come together on one day, look at it, catalog it away, and then move on for the following year.

So Happy Great Day of Failure, friends.  May your failures be massive but not harmful, and may the failure in everything new you tried be a badge of honor for you as you enter the next year.

Trust me, there are plenty of new ways to fail.