Success Requires Failure
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We live in a world that wants instant gratification. We want to be the best and have the best with all the perks, but we don’t want to be uncomfortable to do it. Societally, we see failure as a negative, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. In order to grow and evolve, you have to fail, but failure is a temporary state as long as you don’t give up.
I think the statistic is that toddlers fall over 100 times a day in their pursuit of walking upright. Can you image if they fell a few times and then were like “you know what…walking isn’t for me”. No, they learn and adapt and continue to try, and we should follow their sage advice.
We have to change the way that we perceive failure. How do you feel about failure? What is your attitude toward it? In my few short years on Earth, I have failed many times and I’m sure there are many more to come, but I can tell you two lessons I’ve learn from failure. They’re the lessons that drive me to push myself.
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If you’re not failing, you’re not aiming high enough.
Just because you’re not failing doesn’t mean you’re succeeding. It actually means you’re not trying hard enough, you’re just existing. Too many of us try to lie ourselves by not aiming high enough, but if there isn’t risk of failure in the attempt, there’s rarely opportunity for growth.
Many of us have a fear of failure, so we live in this in-between world of being just good enough, but not truly successful. We are so caught up with trying to avoid making mistakes that we don’t learn how to be uncomfortable and letting that teach us how to move forward. But most of learn from experience, and one of the best ways to gain experience is to try and to do.
Trying and doing allows us to learn from our mistakes and to understand where our strengths and weaknesses lie. If we don’t try, we have no idea what we could have learned from an experience, and there’s no pressure to be better. If you’re trying to learn Spanish, then go to that family restaurant and try to speak in Spanish. You’re going to feel foolish, and you might embarrass yourself, but you’ll learn SO much more than just talking to the computer on Rosetta Stone.
Failure Challenges Your Identity
For me, this was one of the biggest lessons learned from failure. I had always been an A and B student in high school. I wasn’t even trying, ya’ll. Roll up to class, memorize some stuff, come back a few weeks later, BOOM, aced the test. My first year in college… two Fs…count em, 2, and my entire world shattered.
If I’m not an A and B student, then what am I? That’s all I had going for me; I was “academically gifted”. But failure has a way of challenging you to figure things out. It’s not you failing that determines success, but how you react after failure.
Failure gave me the freedom to go and try other things.
It allowed me the opportunity to try other ways of doing something I thought could only be done one way. Failure allows you to evaluate what does and does not work. Now you’ve ruled out a set of things that don’t work and when you try again, you give yourself a higher percentage chance of being successful.
The question isn’t if you’re going to fail, it’s “what will you do when you fail; what have you learned”?
Rethink the way you view failure. Look at it as a chance to evaluate what you’ve learned. And please remember, it’s only a total failure if you give up. Be kind to yourself, dust yourself off, learn, and try again.
