Learning to Embrace Failure

So, the last time you failed at something what did you do?  Most of us are embarrassed about letting anyone know that we have failed, so we hide our failure from the rest of the world and sometimes ourselves, not wanting to accept that we had failed.  We have grown up learning about succeeding and not many of us learnt about failure in our younger years.

As babies when we were learning to walk with no strength, balance or coordination we fell down hundreds of time, sometimes laughing and sometimes crying but we always got back up and tried again.  We didn’t worry if anyone could see we had failed because we didn’t know what failure was, we hadn’t been taught that word yet.  As we grow up we learn all too well about failure and we take this into our adult life.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could go back to the mind of that child learning to walk?  We have to remember; if we fail, get back up and make changes as necessary in order to succeed. 

It is amazing how many people have failed and gone on to overwhelming success:

·       JK Rowling was divorced, bankrupt and on welfare when she wrote Harry Potter.  Her manuscript was rejected by dozens of publishers. She never gave up and finally a publisher agreed to publish it.  She’s now a billionaire.

·       Lady Gaga was dropped by Def Jam records after only 3 months. She is now one of the bestselling artists of all time with 6 Grammy Awards and 13 MTV Video Music Awards

·       Steven Spielberg was rejected both times he applied to attend film school at the University of Southern California.  He has now grossed $8.5 billion from films he directed and has become a trustee of the university.

·       No one wanted to hire Walt Disney as an artist.  His first animations studio went bankrupt and then he went on to co-found The Walt Disney Corporation.

·       Michael Jordan, considered to be the greatest basketball player of all time, was devastated when he was cut from his high school basketball team.  Good thing failure only inspired him to work harder.

And

·       Steve Jobs was fired from the company he founded – Apple.  He also failed with his next 2 computer companies.  When Jobs returned to Apple, he led the business to become the most profitable company in the US.

Our failures can be the most important lessons we ever learn.  If we don’t learn, we will make the same mistakes continuously and will never succeed or reach our goals.  Embrace failure and use it as a tool to learn what to do next to succeed.

Without failure we won’t succeed.  It is a natural steppingstone to success as long as we use it to our advantage.

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” 

- Robert F. Kennedy