This weekend, the candidates and I had another grading. Sifu Brinker said something that really caught my attention. He mentioned that failing is only a matter of quitting. To me, this spoke volumes. There has been many times in my kung fu journey that I have had the mindset of failure but I now realize that I didn’t fail. I simply didn’t succeed on my first attempt, which prepared me more for my second attempts and then my third and so on. When you don’t succeed it is important to not rake yourself through the mud with the idea of failure. I’m not saying to just forget about them though. If you simply forget about your first or second attempt, you will never learn from them and you may never succeed. All of this then ties into one of the black belt code of ethics. Accept responsibility for their actions and mistakes, learn from the past, and prepare for the future. If we don’t acknowledge or previous attempts we won’t be able to learn from the past which will make it even harder to prepare for the future. 

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