Success and failure are terms that you need to define for yourself. How you define them and how you measure yourself to your standards is very personal. It also has a very significant impact on what you achieve in life as well as how happy you are.
There will be times you feel you have failed to achieve what you set out to do. The only way you can avoid failure in life is to do nothing. As soon as you decide to do things, you will start to experience some failure mixed in with the successes you have. This is normal and natural. In fact, the more you do, the more failure you will experience.
A young person once asked Thomas John Watson Sr., the man that created the American computer giant International Business Machines (IBM), “how can I become successful?”. Thomas Watson replied saying “If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate”.
You will find times in your vegan journey where you feel you have failed. When you find yourself in this situation, ask yourself what you can learn from the situation. Then ask yourself how you can act differently in the future so that you do not feel like you failed next time. Learning from failure is something you can do in all aspects of life. We discuss it here because we hear from so many people that decide to become vegan, begin their journey, then something happens, and they feel they have failed. It is so sad when people allow that to be the end of their vegan journey.
As soon as you have decided you want to be a vegan, and you begin to act like how you believe a vegan should act, you are a vegan. There is no public exam you have to pass in order to be a certified vegan. As you progress along your journey you will continually identify things you used to feel were ok but now you feel you should not do. Accept this is a normal part of growing. Learn from the situation, and keep moving forwards.
We have specifically not given any examples of what might constitute a failure here because everybody’s standards and experiences are so different.
We believe the Vegan Society’s definition of veganism is a good place to start as you think about what you need to do to be vegan ‘… a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of humans, animals and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals …’ but do not forget that these words were writing by people. They were not written by the gods on tablets of stone during a trip to the mountains. And there are no secret vegan police authoritative on how the pedantic should interpret this definition. Only you can decide if you are living up to your own standards of veganism. As you learn more and you become aware of behaviours you want to change, just change them. Do not see it as a failure. See it as a natural part of growing.