“It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.” — J.K. Rowling
Why Failure is so Important
Failure, big or small is an important and necessary part of life, even though it hurts and that is why many people will not admit to it. Failure alters the landscape of your life, finances, relationship, and self-worth.
And, if you’re anything like me, then you’ve also most likely failed many times over. I can’t say that I particularly enjoy failing, but failure, through its life-altering lessons. Failure is a great teacher; it can chip away at all the excess around you, mould and shape you for your future; failure makes you into a better person.
Failure teaches you compassion, empathy, kindness, and great achievement that you could be less likely to reach for. It’s through failure that you learn the greatest lessons that life could teach but you will miss the lessons if you can only see failure as a negative life experience. Every form of failure leaves you with emotional turmoil and upset, agonizing pangs of guilt, regret, and remorse. But those that have known true failure and have bounced back from it understand that failure in life is necessary for success.
If you try to go through life without failing at anything, maybe you’re not really living a life at all because taking risks and failing is part of life; it makes you into who we are. In fact, the most successful people in life have failed many times too. No parent stops their child from falling when they are learning to walk, which is a type of failure. Rather, they will celebrate every attempt, every slight movement and rejoice over the first step of the child. But why isn’t failure at other things treated this way?
Unfortunately, society celebrates successes without highlighting the epic journeys towards such success that are filled with trials, tribulations, upsets, setbacks, and failures because it’s not as glamorous to talk about those things.
“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” — Michael Jordan
Benefits of Failure
Failure can become a stepping stone if you allow it to teach you these life lessons.
1. Experience
When you go through something that you cannot walk away from, you gain the first-hand experience which is something truly invaluable that helps you to develop a deeper understanding of life. It alters your frame-of-mind, makes you reflect on the real nature and importance of things, transforming and improving your future-selves.
2. Knowledge
Failure brings important first-hand knowledge that 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 the accumulated knowledge developed from nearly 10,000 failed attempts that ultimately led to his success.
3. Resilience
Failing in life helps to build resilience. In order to achieve great success, you must learn resilience. If you think you’re going to succeed on the first try, or even the first few tries, you’re sure to set yourself up for a far more painful failure. Resilience helps to breed success by setting the game up to win. Gone are the lofty expectations that things will happen overnight and that expectations that true success will take an enormous amount of work and effort.
4. Growth
When you fail, you grow and mature as human beings. You reach deeper meanings and understandings about your life and why you’re doing the things that you’re doing. This helps you to reflect and take things into perspective, and develop meaning from painful situations.
Life is designed for you to grow and improve. From the very genetic fibres that make you into who we are as individual persons, into the fabric of society on a global scale, growth is a fundamental part of you, and without growth, you couldn’t improve life on every front.
5. 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 because value 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.
#failureisnotallbad #prideinstitute #lifelessonsfromfailure
ability2succeed 