“Within disappointment is great knowledge, if you have the courage to look at your life beyond the perspective of your ego.”
–Brianna Wiest
When you hear the word failure, what comes to mind? If you see someone failing, how do you feel? Say you fail miserably at something – do you stop, keep going or rest? How do you think about failure. Can you remember any specific experience when you tried once & failed? How about when you put in so much effort & failed? And when you just did what you had to do without worrying too much if you’re doing it wrong or being judged for trying? Can you recall when you decided to just keep going until you succeed?
“Sometimes, the weight of your dissatisfaction comes from the crashing down of all the perspectives you’ve heard & held within, what you’ve tried to measure up to, as if one sunrise could compete with the next, one field of grass could flow with the wind in a more perfect pattern.”
–Brianna Wiest
Growing up, I enjoyed this science class taught by one of my favourite elementary teachers. She was objective & calm. I fondly remember this time when we were dissecting frogs & my classmate’s frog leapt out of the table with its skin sliced open. The entire class tried to help in capturing it & our teacher helped them repeat the procedure. My music teacher was also admirable. I regularly performed at school whenever there were events & would have after class practice sessions. We would rehearse a song repeatedly until I mastered it before performance day. She would play the piano & I would read the lyrics & notes on the music sheets.
During high school, I enjoyed Geometry class so much ’cause the recitations felt like a performance. I would rehearse it at home to finish as fast as I could. Before graduating from high school, I took multiple entrance exams & successfully passed in 4 out of 5 universities. When the results came in, I found out that I received 3 scholarship offers & failed a subject in 1 university from which I could have enrolled through an appeal. Yet my parents were too afraid that I would fail & lose my scholarship. Heads up, you should always believe in someone’s potential. Projecting your fears unto them & showing that you think they’ll fail doesn’t help anyone.
I studied & memorized all my camera & lens manuals & read as much as I could when I was new in photography & videography. I was exploring it for my blogsite where I featured different businesses. These were the early days of content creation. I also purchased books & courses online to improve my craft. My senior at work taught me how to film at an event & edit a video. It’s funny to think how I edited a 20minute video for 2 long weeks during that time. When I mastered it years later, I could edit a 50minute television show from scratch in one day – complete with supers, subtitles, audio cleaning, sfx, gfx, colorgrading, etc.
Meanwhile the photos I took during my first years of exploration totally sucked. But after years of practicing it – once I was set on my favourite gears; discovered & mastered my framing, composition & color style, photography became second nature to me. It was so easy to spot photo opportunities at any given moment & it remained an enjoyable process.
“What does not hold is not meant to. If you are not certain, wait. Time reveals all truth, all knowing, all reality will come to be. It will all become clear.”
–Brianna Wiest
Then I tried different businesses later on. I launched a property on Airbnb & successfully styled & prepared it for guests. Some guests were already booked for a 2-week staycation. My husband & I were getting ready for our new work & business setup as well. He was supposed to work overseas. We were ironing out our plans so I could fly back & forth to visit him often. But the universe had other things in mind. On the week of my Airbnb launch, just weeks before my husband’s supposed flight – the 2020 Covid pandemic broke out. I canceled my guests’ bookings & my husband had to reject the offer & wait things out.
“One day, life will show you that your quietest hopes were the outline of your destiny. One day, life will show you the purpose of the pieces that fell apart and what came together in their place.”
–Brianna Wiest
My partner & I kept on winning at life before the pandemic. We were investing on a real estate property at a young age of 26. I had a thriving business. I filmed for a living for established high end companies & popular fashion magazines. During the pandemic though, I shut down my photography & videography business due to a faulty & complicated LGU system. Next, I failed to push through my planned Airbnb launch. My husband lost some personal side projects & had to put his overseas offer on hold. Everything suddenly took a pause.
We decided to cut further damages & losses at some point. I managed to sell our first car. Then, we opened our property for sale. Since we don’t have attachment to material things, this was simply a business decision. We were aware so we simply accepted the possibility that things might get worse & just wanted to have a good back up plan if it did. In the end though, all of these plans failed, one by one. My partner & I were a solid team & we just kept on trying to find a way. If there was one thing that I loved about this phase is how we rediscovered our partnership & how much stronger we became together.
We still plan to put up our small property for rent in the coming years or sell it & get a more spacious property. Luck is still on our side; the value of our property has pretty much doubled from when we got it.
“You have no idea how not alone you are. You have no idea how many other people walk through this world with similar thoughts & fears. How many people have felt the sinking, crashing weight of heartbreak, the hope of the future, wondering if they did it all wrong. It is easy to feel alone. You are not alone. You have no idea how not alone you are.”
–Brianna Wiest
There’s nothing to be ashamed of when we fail & try again & again. It’s only when we try that we get to figure things out. I honestly think that failures are the most beautiful occurrences – but only if we truly accept & listen to what it’s trying to tell us. You could think that failures are like tests to see if you could already breakthrough to the next level. There’s a natural process to growth & failure happens because it is asking you to do something differently. It’s asking you to consolidate, to have backup plans if other things occur. Failures are just telling you something about yourself & your perspective. They tell us which approach won’t work & the more we try, the more we get closer to unlocking what we’re not yet capable of understanding today.
If you think about it, there wouldn’t be progress without any sort of failure. Whenever people fail at something, we learn something new. Small but consistent improvements in the right trajectory will get us where we want to go. And we can only improve something if we’re aware that it’s not working.
When my science teacher kept teaching us calmly – she taught us objectivity. This is why dissecting a frog was not even a bit scary to us. When my music teacher rehearsed with me over & over again – I probably sang some notes incorrectly. But, she corrected me on each mistake until we mastered it. When I practiced for my Geometry recitation at home over & over again, it became easier because I’d remember what I usually forgot. So, I prepared mental hints which helped me remember everything I had to.
When I passed my college scholarship exams but wasn’t supported – I was confused because I believed in myself yet wasn’t given a chance to reach my potential. For a while, I actually stopped believing in myself. I gladly recovered & found out that it didn’t matter so much where I studied. When I didn’t know how to take photos yet or how to film videos & direct celebrities, it didn’t stop me from purchasing my gears & trying. I decided to invest in myself until everything finally felt aligned.
When I failed over & over again in different businesses, I kept trying other things – shampoo & conditioner bar business?! Sure! Let’s message my classmates from college & get me on their show so I could promote on TV. Business is not working well? Next! How about content creation on IG during the pandemic? Sure! Offered barter to small businesses at first until it became profitable. Offer websites to some clients & work with my husband on some projects? Game! Some law firm clients didn’t pay what was due? No problem! Next! Until luckily, I finally found what I really want to succeed in. And I’ll tell you that right now, after 2 years – I’m still learning how to be consistently profitable in this field.
But if there’s something I am sure of is that I will keep on trying & moving forward until I reach the day when I could say “I finally made it to the other side.”
So what does it truly mean to fail? It simply means you grow in each attempt. Fail now & fail as fast as you could again & again. Until you figure things out, until you figure out yourself. You actually need to go through 10,000 snaps before you master your photography. If anything, failures teach us where we are lacking & how we can improve. In every attempt, just keep fixing one small problem & change that tiny thing. There’s no doubt that one day, you’ll get there.
Coffee soon,
Anne