What Did You Fail At During The Pandemic? Uh, Everything (?!)

When they asked Mike Birbiglia what he failed at during the pandemic, he couldn’t pick one thing. Diet? Sleep? Healthy habits? Check, check, and check. He failed at everything. It made him wonder, “What didn’t I fail at?”

Life is messy. Mistakes are made. Failure is a part of it. Especially in a time of transition, there’s usually no shortage of screw-ups.

As an outsider though, we also get to know what Birbiglia literally didn’t fail at during the pandemic. As people who put our work out and into the world, this part is really important.

Birbiglia launched a podcast, gave a ton of money to charity, figured out a way to do different live shows and streams, and a whole lot more. And – he did it all while simultaneously feeling like he was failing at everything.

Perseverance. Even when it feels like nothing is going our way, like we’re failing at everything and everybody knows it, we keep going. We do our work. We push forward.

Failure doesn’t have to just be painful. It can be motivating. And, we all could stand to take a page from Birbiglia here, we’re way better off when we can laugh about it too.

Fail. Then laugh it off and move forward.

I got this idea from Mike Birbiglia’s Gary Gulman interview on the Working It Out podcast.