Guest Article
Written by Jordan Menashy, Co-Founder & VP of Marketing at Bench / @JordanMenashy
Failure can be seen as something admirable. It means you were willing to take the chance to try to do something truly great. When you look at it through that lens, failure just becomes part of the journey to doing something wonderful.
The question is, how do you have the same amount of confidence, and how can you be just as whole with yourself, in the times when you’re the most successful as the times where you’re the least? When you think about that, you have to realize that success can’t be something you externalize. The way to be okay with failure is to be at a place where you truly believe that you are taking the steps to be the person who you want to be. If you can wake up every day and know that the actions you take are congruent with that, then there’s nothing that can happen outside of you that can ever change the way you feel about yourself. So success and failure need to start from the inside, and if you can be whole with that, then anything else that happens is just life. Often times we talk about failure that happens outside of you, when in fact real failure is any time you aren’t harmonious with who you want to be as a person.
At Bench, I don’t gauge success by our staff headcount or money we have raised—all of that would be meaningless if not for the joy we get from the people we work with. The projects I get to bear witness to, the depth of friendships that are made, and the impact that has in people’s lives outside the company walls, make our growth worthy of pursuing. Bench then becomes this community of wonderful and talented people who get to work together towards a common goal—but in that work, also get to inspire and invigorate each other so they can then take that energy and pour it out into the rest of their world. That’s the kind of thing I want to be part of because it follows the person I desire to be. That’s how I commit wholeheartedly to this journey, irrespective of its ups and downs.
Decide who you want to be as a person, be that person, and then go try to do great things in the world. You’ll have nothing to lose and yourself to gain. 3ND