Recently I had one of those conversations that sticks with you.
Our son Tom helps coach youth baseball and softball teams, including the ones his son and daughter (our grandkids) play on. Recently we were in Texas to watch our 10-year-old grandson play in a big tournament. After a heart-breaking loss, the head coach called the team together for a post-game huddle. Afterwards, I asked my son what words of wisdom the head coach had shared. Tom told me the coach encouraged his young players to be thankful for their failures at the plate. He said, “If you guys somehow knew that you were 1,000 or 10,000 failures away from reaching your goals, how fast would you try to fail? How excited about failure would you be?” 
Babe Ruth said it too. “Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.”
The message was simple: failure is not the opposite of progress. Failure is progress. Every strikeout, every weak grounder, every missed pitch was not proof they were bad hitters. It was part of the long process of becoming good ones.
I told Tom that it reminded me of an often-repeated saying we have in whitewater kayaking: “We are all between swims.” Every kayaker swims eventually. Beginners swim. Experts swim. Instructors swim. World-class paddlers swim. The difference is not whether you swim. It’s how you respond, and how you gradually extend the interval between swims. 
In both baseball and whitewater kayaking, beginners often assume failure means they don’t belong. A young baseball player strikes out several times and starts thinking, “Maybe I’m not an athlete.” A new kayaker flips over in a rapid, swims to shore cold and embarrassed, and decides, “Maybe this sport isn’t for me.”
That’s the tragedy. Because the swim or the strikeout was never the real test.
The real test is whether you understand that struggling is not evidence you are incapable. It’s evidence you’re learning a difficult skill. It means you’re pushing yourself beyond your former boundaries. You’re learning to do something most people can’t.
Nobody learns to hit a baseball without missing hundreds or thousands of times. Nobody becomes a competent whitewater paddler without swimming. Fear, frustration, embarrassment and failure are not detours from the path. They are the path.
What I admire about good coaches, whether in baseball or kayaking, is that they help students reinterpret failure. They remove the shame from it. They teach people to see mistakes as information instead of verdicts.
A kayaker learns why they lost balance.
A hitter learns to recognize a curveball.
A kayaker learns to stay calm underwater.
A batter learns not to fear two strikes.
Progress often looks ugly while it’s happening. Some of the strongest kayakers I know used to swim a lot. Some excellent ball players spent years struggling before things finally clicked. Persistence matters more than early success. What matters is getting back in the boat. Or stepping back into the batter’s box.
When I think about my son coaching young players, I realize he and I are teaching the same lesson in two completely different environments. One happens on a baseball diamond. The other happens in cold, moving water. But both are really about helping people become comfortable being imperfect while they learn.
Maybe that’s one of the most valuable lessons for any of us. Not how to avoid failure, but how to learn from it. 
