Grow from Failures: Use Them to Succeed
Highly successful people are the ones who have failed the most.
As the public, we usually only learn about these individuals and their companies once they have made it big. We admire their success yet rarely witness the immense struggle they went through to get there. By not being exposed to their failures, we are unfortunately only left to compare ourselves to their achievements.
This in turn can make it hard for us to validate the mistakes we make and problems we experience. We often second-guess ourselves and question our abilities; not realizing that adversity is required in order to succeed.
This way of thinking has made the world afraid of failure. Even from a young age we have been taught that being wrong and making mistakes are bad. Our mind itself uses painful memories of the past to provoke negative emotions like fear and anxiety to stop us from making those same errors today.
What is failure, really? Why is it so important to fail at something before we can succeed?
And the most successful people in life have failed the most times. If you try to go through life without failing at anything, then you’re not really living a life at all. Taking risks and falling down flat on our faces is part of life; it makes us into who we are.
Experience
The first important lesson gained from failure is experience.
What happens when we fail? When we go through something and can walk away with firsthand experience, it helps us to develop a deeper understanding of life.
The experience of failing at something is truly invaluable. It completely alters our frame of mind through the induction of pain. It makes us reflect on the real nature of things and their importance in our lives, transforming and improving our future selves.
Knowledge
Failure brings with it important firsthand knowledge. That knowledge can be harnessed in the future to overcome that very failure that inflicted so much pain in the first place. Nothing can replace the knowledge gained from failure.
When Thomas Edison famously failed nearly 10,000 times to create a commercially viable electric lightbulb, with each failure, he gained the knowledge of just one more avenue that didn’t work. It was knowledge developed from nearly 10,000 failed attempts that ultimately led to his success.
Resilience
Failing in life helps to build resilience. The more we fail, the more resilient we become.
In order to achieve great success and grow from failures, we must know resilience. Because, if we think that we’re going to succeed on the first try, or even the first few tries, then we’re sure to set ourselves up for a far more painful failure.
The characteristic of resilience can help us in so many ways in life. Resilience helps to breed success by setting the game up to win. Gone are the lofty expectations that thing will happen overnight, and in comes the expectations that true success will take an enormous amount of work and effort.
Growth
When we fail, we grow from failures and mature as human beings. We reach deeper meanings and understandings about our lives and why we’re doing the things that we’re doing. This helps us to reflect and take things into perspective, developing meaning from painful situations.
Life is designed for us to grow and improve. From the very genetic fibers that make us into who we are as individual persons, into the fabric of society on a global scale, growth is a fundamental part of us. Without growth, we couldn’t improve life on every front.
Value
One of the biggest lessons that we can learn from life’s failures is the necessity to create and spread an exceedingly high amount of value. In fact, value truly lies at the heart of success and a lack of value is a fundamental pillar to failure.
In thinking about your past failures, think about how much value you brought to the table. Could you have offered more value? Would that have prevented failure? When you learn to create immense value and do so consistently, you will eventually succeed.
To learn how to truly recover and grow from failure, begin your self-coaching journey with David’s upcoming book: Take Charge of You: How Self-Coaching Can Transform Your Life and Career, co-written by globally recognized Performance Coach, Jason Goldsmith. Read this and this will help you to run the road to success and give you step-by-step guidance into your very own self-coaching plan.