I hope you fail

Welcome to the inaugural edition of Foolproof. I’m excited that you’re here!

You’ve got a busy day ahead of you, so I’ll get to the point: failing is necessary, and if you’ve failed this week, Ed Sheeran & my therapist would say you’re on the right track.

My therapist on Saturday showed me this video of Ed Sheeran talking about failure, and it hits. And as someone who fails a lot, I think I’m qualified to talk about it. Also, I wrote about it already once as a sophomore in college (it’s just as cringey as you’d expect).

You should watch the clip, but in a nutshell: Ed is asked by the host if he’s always been such a good singer. They pull up a video of him singing at age 14, and the evidence suggests that no, he has def not. Ed says he learned how to sing by failing over and over again: “You learn nothing from success.”

I imagine this isn’t the first time you’re hearing about failure, so it’s not meant to be some sort of provocative manifesto or whatever. Instead, I hope it’s a good reminder for the week that if you didn’t get that promotion or your boss shot down your idea at work or maybe even you started a fight with your SO because you were crabby, it happens to literally all of us.

Or maybe it was something bigger than that. And then I could regale you with stories of how Arianna Huffington was rejected by 36 publishers, or how Anna Wintour was fired from her job as a junior fashion editor for Harper’s Bazaar.

As Ed says, failure is literally necessary for success to happen if we learn from it. We just collectively don’t like to talk about failing because there’s usually a lot of shame around it. That kind of shame can make you want to crawl inside yourself. Which is totally normal for all of us but the sociopathic.

In the honor of practicing what I preach and maybe making you feel better about yourself: two of my magazine pitches got rejected this week. Despite this being something that you know to expect as a writer, that didn’t stop me from momentarily feeling like maybe I should give it all up and like, move to a commune. Not to be dramatic.

Anyway, I won’t stop pitching, and here’s something I read this week & liked:

Thanks for making it to the end. You can find me on IG and Tiktok, linked in the banner below. I love chatting in the DM’s, and it’d be awesome if you could let me know what you thought of this week’s newsletter, or maybe even send me a win from the week or advice you heard recently that I could share? We’d love to celebrate you.

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