You are a new person, every second of every day. As soon as something has happened, it’s no longer something that’s happened to you, in a certain sense. Because the past is immutable, it can be jettisoned as emotional weight. You can detach.
That means that if you’ve failed, stumbled, or made missteps – you can immediately observe them objectively as if they happened to someone else. Because they did.
A past failure should not be a blow to your emotional well-being. It should be an instruction manual for how not to fail again. Rarely can it be both, though – so if you’re reeling emotionally from a failure, you’re probably not learning valuable lessons from it.
Get away from the creeping mentality that you’re somehow nothing more than the sum total of all your failures. You’re not. You’re just the author of an incredible awesome instruction manual for future success.
The Opportunity Machine 