Making the Most of Your Failures by Cody Boone

Baseball is a game of failure, plain and simple. The best hitters of all time still fail 6 out of every 10 at-bats. One of the best teams record-wise of all time was the 2004 Seattle Mariners. With a record of 116 wins and 46 losses is one of the best in history, and they still lost 46 games. After winning 116 games and seeming like a lock for the World Series, the 2004 Mariners didn’t even make it out of the American League Championship series. While winning games is the ultimate goal in baseball, it’s more important to learn from your failures and losses to be successful in the future.

Life works the same way. As children, baseball players as a whole have a hard time accepting their failures and seeing their failures as a blessing in disguise. Young kids don’t like to fail, and that’s just human nature. However, as young players grow, the ones who become successful take what they struggle at as a challenge. One phrase that my new head coach uses is, “The game teaches you what you need to improve on.” When he first told us that, as a team, we brushed it off because we thought we knew what we needed to. However, as the fall season progressed, we realized that the things we thought we had mastered were some of the things that needed the most work. We realized that our coach was right; the game does teach us what we need to get better at by making us fail first.

I’m not saying that you have to be okay with losing or failing by any means. That’s the exact opposite of what I’m saying. You have to let your failures and losses fuel your fire. If the game shows you that you need to work on something to be successful, stop at nothing until you perfect your craft. Having a mindset of making the most of your failures means taking an L in the loss column and turning it into a LEARN. Taking a failure during a game or practice and learning from it so next time you find yourself in that situation you remember your failure, and draw a proverbial line in the sand saying, “I’m not letting this happen again.” The best baseball players in the world take every failure that they have and learn from it. We all know the saying. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.