Failing Fast & Failing Forward

One of my favorite quotes is from Winston Churchill:

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts"

That quote really hits home for me. Earlier in life, every time I hit a milestone—made my first million, closed a big deal, climbed one mountain—I was already looking toward the next one. Success felt like forward motion. But one could argue it wasn’t success at all—just unchecked ambition.

The truth is, most people trying to better themselves or leave their mark don’t leap from one peak to the next. They stumble. They fall into valleys. They get stuck in deserts. They get shipwrecked, abandoned, broke. They lose confidence. They bleed. They cry.

I’ve been failing a lot lately.

I’ve been in prison for over four years now. My business collapsed. My reputation was dragged through the mud. My kids barely know me. I’ve failed—and I keep failing. When you’re in the system long enough, you get transferred from prison to prison, and every time you have to start over.

It’s a little too simple to say, but it’s kind of like a video game. You start with nothing—no tools, no resources, no contacts. You don’t know the rules, who you can trust, or even where to begin. And if you’re not careful, you die—figuratively or literally. The beginning is the hardest. You feel disoriented, powerless, vulnerable. But eventually—sometimes faster than you’d think—you start figuring it out. You learn the map. You find resources. You recognize the booby traps and spot the bad guys. You level up.

But unlike a video game, there’s no checkpoint in prison. When you get transferred, you don’t keep your gear—you lose everything. You start from zero again.

I’ve been transferred to nine different institutions in four years. Nine resets. Nine new environments. Nine times starting over from scratch. But here’s the thing—here’s the key:

Failing doesn’t make you a failure.

Think about Thomas Edison. He tried 10,000 times before he found the right filament for the lightbulb. Colonel Sanders went broke hauling his fried chicken recipe from diner to diner. Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison before walking out and changing history. What they had in common? They didn’t let failure define them.

You have to choose how you interpret your situation. And yeah, that’s hard. Especially when you’re staring at four concrete walls for 23 hours a day. It’s easy to let your body’s confinement become a prison for your mind too. But that’s not how I’ve wired my brain.

When I land somewhere new and I’m surrounded by those four walls again, I ask for a pencil and paper. If the guards won’t give it to me, I trade food for it. In prison, two or three days’ worth of food can get you a lot more than you’d think. Once I’ve got that pen and paper, I get to work. I plan. I write. I map out business ideas. I visualize. I pray. I move.

Every failure becomes a setup—not a setback.

A setup to get sharper. Stronger. More strategic. Not just physically, but internally. Spiritually. Mentally.

And I know some of you reading this are in your own kind of prison right now. Maybe your career ended. Maybe your relationship fell apart. Maybe you made mistakes—dumb ones—and you’ve let yourself and others down.

That’s not failure.

That’s a setup.

If a door closed, maybe there’s a better one waiting—and you just need to prepare yourself for it. If someone left, maybe there’s something you were meant to learn so that next time, you’ll show up stronger, softer, wiser.

But you have to own it. You have to look in the mirror and take responsibility for your part. Not in shame, but in truth. Because no one is perfect.

Let me say that again: no one is perfect.

But you are perfectly you—with all your bruises, screwups, wins, and restarts.

Don’t let the dark days break you. Let them build you. Let them forge you.

Now stop reading this—you’ve got sh💩t to do.