The other day, I misread the phrase, “falling short” as “failing short“. At first, I laughed, and then I began to think about what it might mean to ‘fail short‘.To fall short is to fail to meet the expected standards, whether yours or another’s. To fail is to 1)be unsuccessful in achieving one’s goal or 2)neglect to do something. I’m going to use the second definition for this illustration.
When we fall short, we have tried and failed to meet the target. We can assume we have given it our best effort.
What is Failing Short?
Failing short is when we neglect to do the things that we know would help us move forward. Or, we do the same thing we’ve done before and hope to have a different result. Failing short carries the weight of not doing what we said we would, of not living up to our intentions.
We fail short when we:
- Procrastinate and put off the actions that would move us toward our goal.
- Neglect to do what we know we should, such as sign a contract promptly, make an important phone call or answer a critical email.
- Ignore critical measures such as income and revenue by playing out of sight, out of mind.
- Repeat the same actions the same way we have before, even though we failed.
Falling short may be completely due to circumstances beyond our control. Failing short is completely within our power. The good news is that since we have control over our actions, we can choose to never ‘fail short’ again.