So here we are, yet another Thanksgiving has come along; the  27th of my relatively short life, my first spent in New York in nearly a decade, and arguably the first ever in which I am keenly aware of a genuinely non-sarcastic reason to be grateful at this point in my life: failure.

Yes. This Thanksgiving, what I am most grateful for is failure. Specifically, I am grateful for all the failures which I have experienced up until now, and cautiously grateful for all of the failures which still lay ahead of me.

To be sure, this is an odd thing to be grateful for; failure isn’t inherently fun, nor is it pleasurable. It doesn’t feel good, it never seems to pass quickly enough, and it all-too-often leaves you feeling broken and confused. In comparison, success seems to be an intangible far more worthy of gratitude. Surely the acceptance, satisfaction, and respect earned as a byproduct of success are well deserved, and ideal measures of  just how grateful a person should be for the good things in his or her life.

But here’s the thing – success is entirely a product of failure. Failure creates unbiased benchmarks with which we can compare our current selves with the person we aim to be. All our complaining and dismissal of culpability for who we are and what we do cannot hide the simple truth that failure sheds light upon: something about us must change, something within must grow in order to achieve success.

This truth has been among the few constants I learned to embrace from a young age. I learned the importance of empathy after my selfish behavior and flippant attitude cost me the companionship of some of my closest friends. I learned to embrace change after my arrogance ultimately resulted in the loss of a job that I poured 100% of myself into. I learned how to respect both women and myself through disappointment, doing so much that I never want to repeat, and experiencing so much that I do not want to experience again. I learned the importance of family after spending too much time distancing myself, until realizing that this precious resource won’t exist forever and that few people in this world will selflessly hope to their core for your success. I learned to express humility, to work hard, and to be confident through being wrong, losing, and missed opportunities. I have learned so much through failure.

I am who I am today because of my failures; they don’t define me; rather, I glean insights from them to periodically redefine myself. And I stand here in spite of those failures, successful in the things I apply my hard earned insights to. I am still far from perfect, and I know that some of my imperfections will inevitably lead to more pain and setbacks, but I am grateful that through these experiences I will continue to grow until my rate of success is significantly greater than my rate of failure.

So on this Thanksgiving Day, the best message I could hope to share with you is simply this: embrace your failures, accept them, and overcome them. They will transform you into exactly what you need to be to find your success and happiness.

-Namakemono