Failure is Your Friend, Not Your Enemy.

Failure is a part of life. No matter how hard you try, you will fail. You will fail more times than you succeed. The odds are stacked against you. The only sensible thing you can do is to learn to fail well.

As we go through life, we tend to fail a lot, but we don’t worry about it so much when we’re young. As a baby, we fall over trying to walk, then we get up and try again and again. We think nothing of it.

Yet as we get older and become more aware of the world, we become more and more scared of failure. If we fail at something once, we’re made to feel bad. The stakes seem to get higher as we move through life and we shy further and further away from the possibility of failing, to the point that we become scared to try for fear of judgement and people laughing at us.

However, if you fail at something, it’s not the end of the world. Things could always be worse. We must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, learn from it and move on.

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

Winston churchill

Seek Out Failure

Actively try to seek out failure in life because that is how we learn. In most situations, we must not be scared of failing. We could all make friends with failure, because it will appear in life more often than we want it to.

In most societies there is a ‘cult of perfection’. You must be seen to be a ‘success’ in every aspect of life and you must never, ever fail. You need to be rich, you need to be cool, you need to be permanently happy, you need six-pack abs, you need a big house, anything less than this and you’re a failure. Oh, and you must succeed at everything you try…first time round.

But this simply isn’t true.

Failing causes anxiety and stress and can be demoralising because we place so much pressure on succeeding.

Failure is seen as an identity instead of an event. If you fail once, it’s viewed as a colossal character flaw that you may never be able to recover from. We try to hide our failures and pretend that they never happened or better yet, we make up an excuse as to why it happened and why we weren’t responsible.

But there is a lot we can learn from failure if we look at why it happened and how we can improve from it. If things didn’t work out the way you planned, that’s ok. How can you learn from it? What could you do differently next time?

A Bitter Pill to Swallow

Ask yourself honestly: why did you fail?

Was it because of you?

Whilst it may be easy to blame someone else, the competition, the economy, the weather, the lack of sleep or (fill in the blank). Ultimately, you may have failed because the honest truth is that you are not as good as you think you are.

This is a very hard pill to swallow.

However, it’s fine, there is nothing wrong with not being ready yet, you can learn from this and improve and get better for next time. But you have to be able to admit the cold hard truth, otherwise, you will have no reason to change.

---

If you enjoyed this blog, make you subscribe to get an email when a new blog is released…

#selfhelp #personaldevelopment #failure