It started when you were a kid.
- You struck out, and your team lost. You can still hear the groan of the crowd.
- You asked someone out, and they said “no.” You didn’t ask again.
- You worked hard on the school project, but it was returned with a big, red “F.” You lost your interest in that subject.
- You messed up during a major recital. You’ve relived the embarrassment for years.
Nobody likes to fail. You do everything you can to avoid it. You learn that mistakes are bad, so you play it safe. You never take risks because you might not succeed. You stay comfortable.
You decide that failure is the opposite of success. If you want to be successful in anything, you have to eliminate any chance of failing.
So you stop trying.
But you never really succeed.
It reminds me of a huge housing development in Southern California where every house is painted exactly the same shade of beige. I don’t know what it’s like living there, but it somehow feels like a place where people “settle” – doing exactly what everybody else does. It feels like it would be comfortable, but not exciting.
Comfortable is safe. Exciting carries risk of failure.
But the only way to grow is to become best friends fwith failure.
Failure isn’t a stop sign. It’s a direction sign, telling you which way to go next.
Hit a fork in the road? A lot of people get paralyzed, thinking “What if I take the wrong road?”
If you discover it’s the wrong road, good – you’ve eliminated that path. Now you’re free to choose the other path and keep moving toward the next fork.
Fail Fast, Fail Often
Thomas Edison, inventor of the electric light bulb and hundreds of other inventions, failed over 10,000 times in his attempts. A reporter asked him what it felt like to fail that often. His response: “I have not failed 10,000 times. I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”
If you see failure as something to be avoided, you have no chance of success. Every failure contains the seeds of future growth and success.
Failure is a stepping stone, not a barrier. When mistakes happen, they’re painful. But learning from them and moving forward is the only way to grow and succeed.
In his book Failing Forward, author and speaker John Maxwell says, “The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.”
The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.”
John Maxwell
If you’ve ever attended a motivational talk, you might have heard the speaker say, “What would you attempt if you knew you could not fail?”
It sounds good on the surface, but it’s the wrong question. It implies that failure is negative – and if you could avoid it, you’d achieve great things. In reality, failure is the exact ingredient necessary for the highest level of achievement.
A better question might be, “What would you attempt if you knew you would succeed – in spite of repeated failures along the way?”
If you want to be successful in anything, you have to fall in love with failure.
Making the Most of Failure
How can you make the most of failure instead of seeing it as an obstacle? Try these simple steps:
Ask yourself, “Why did this failure happen?” Take the time to learn from the failure so you can avoid it in the future.
Learn from the failure. Ask, “What will I do differently next time?”
Move past your mistakes. They’re in the past, so you can’t change them. Accept the reality of what happened, then use it to take the next step.
Never blame anyone else. Take responsibility for your choices, because they’re the only things you can do anything about.
Become obsessed with growing. Focus on the process more than the outcome, knowing that mistakes will be a valuable resource for moving forward.
Talk about how you feel. If you keep your painful reactions to failure inside, they can become toxic and block your path. Just talking with a friend about those feelings breaks their power over you.
Take the hard road whenever possible. It’s natural to follow “the path of least resistance” because it’s easier to avoid failure. But the most scenic views are usually found at the end of the rockiest trails.
Keep your perspective. Failure is something that happens; it’s not who you are. You’re defined by the actions you take, not the failures you experience.
Redeeming Failure
What do you call a baseball player who strikes out more than they get hits?
A professional.
Remember that time you struck out and lost the game for your team? That’s a failure, right?
Absolutely. And it was painful.
What if you struck out the next time – and the next – and the next? You’d probably want to give up. That would be a logical choice, because it doesn’t feel good.
There was a guy who did exactly that a number of years ago. Over his career, he struck out about 7 times out of every 10 times he came to the plate.
Most of us would have quit. But Babe Ruth kept playing, and became the third top home run hitter in the history of the game. His philosophy? “Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.”
You’re never a failure if you keep trying, no matter how many times you fail. The faster you fail, the faster you’ll reach success.
Failure is either your friend or your enemy.
Maybe it’s time to choose failure as your new best friend.