Growing up, I was an A student. If I didn’t earn an A it killed me. I don’t know exactly where it came from, but I had it in my mind that I needed to get excellent grades in order to go to any college of my choice in order to live the best life. I studied hard, stressed over everything and got into all of the colleges I applied to. And in college I continued my obsession over earning As. I needed to have a great GPA and a full plate of extracurriculars to get a good job.

School does not prepare you for the real world. When you interview for jobs you’re expected to know where you want to be in 5 years. I had no idea. I just knew I wanted to be in a job that I liked and wanted to be “successful”. But what did “successful” mean? For me, it meant being in a position that other people would define as “successful”. As long as I did what I was supposed to and did not disappoint anyone, I would be successful.

As I started working in the real world and especially when I started my first business, I kept hearing about goals. What’s your goal for the year and how will you break it down? I had no idea. My goals in life had always been to earn good grades and follow instructions. I never had a real say in what my goals were. I never had to sit down and set life goals. I just took one day at a time by following instructions.

I hated talking about goals. I know it’s important to have goals so that you have a track to run on and aren’t just aimlessly living without purpose. But goals make me feel stuck. I was so used to achieving As that I didn’t know what the A was in my life. In school I knew exactly what I needed to do in order to achieve an A, but I didn’t know how to achieve an A in life.

Goal setting puts you in charge of what you want to achieve. But I had always gone by the school systems definition of achievement. I didn’t know how to create my own definition. Having to create a definition of success meant having to make a decision. What if I make the wrong decision? What if I choose a goal and it was the wrong one? What if I make a plan to achieve something and it doesn’t work?

These thoughts terrify me. After 17 years of being in a system focused on As, how do you change? In school you learn, you study, you get an A. Those steps were easy to me. But, what’s the A in life?

I’ve struggled to realize that everyone’s definition and path to success is different. But what’s been especially hard for me to learn is that failure is ok. To me not earning an A was failure. I grew up not wanting to fail and knowing how not to fail. But now failure is necessary and unavoidable. I’m trying to learn that it’s ok to fail. With failure comes learning and improvement.

I’m caught in a limbo of creating my own definition of success, the “A” in life, how to achieve it, and realizing that I can really only fail if I stop trying.

Am I the only one that struggles with this? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Be you. Be*YOU*tiful.