is failure as good as people make it out to be

100% what @Melooon says.

Nobody's born a master of anything. We learn to get better. Failure is what happens when we're at the cutting-edge of what we're capable of.

I was explaining this to one of my kids, the other year, while I was teaching her to ski. She asked how I'd gotten so good at skiing. My answer was that I fell over a lot. You can learn to ski super-cautiously and (almost) never fall over... but you learn faster when you're willing to accept a little risk of, y'know, tumbling into an embarrassing snow heap. That's the point at which you know you're pushing your limits. With practice, those limits can grow higher. Maybe they won't forever (I'm moderately sure my skiing ability is close to "peaking"!). But we get there by learning from our failures. With skiing, I got through the failure by revelling in it: enjoying the stories that came out of my failure ("I totally wiped-out on that run! Did you see what a fool I made of myself?").

When I wanted to improve my sleight-of-hand skills, I used to spend my lunch breaks in public spaces, performing magic for strangers. My opener was often "hi, I'm a magician-in-training, do you mind if I show you a magic trick and we'll see if it goes wrong?" (everybody likes to laugh at a magician's failure, it turns out!). That was about pushing myself just-beyond my limits: there's things about close-up magic that you can't learn in front of a mirror or camera: you need an audience to make you think about angles of visibility, about misdirection, about what you do when some smart arse says something that undermines the effect! And so yeah, clearly I failed sometimes. With magic, I got through the failure by accepting the humility (and opening my act with the expectation of it!) and by moving on to the next trick quickly.

For the last few years I've been teaching myself how to play the piano. Having never played a musical instrument of any kind before, I can feel that it exercises a part of my brain that I don't use for... basically anything else (this genuinely surprised me!). I only get to have 10-minute bursts or so, every day, to play, so I need to make the most of that time... so most days, I come at it with a deliberate intention to push myself! If I'm finding it too easy, I ramp up the difficulty: can I do it faster? Can I add a flourish? Can I do it blind? If it's too hard, I scale back: can I learn one hand at a time? Can I find an inversion of that chord that's easier to reach? Can I practice something different for a while? In other words, when I'm learning piano, I get through the failure by tweaking the difficulty level on-the-fly to something that's challenging, but not demoralising.

That's three different strategies I've used/continue to use, for three different things at which I've failed/still fail at in order to learn. Those aren't the only strategies available. You've got to find the right one for your personality and the activity you're practicing. Because once you can find the way to push through failure after failure... that's where the real learning begins!