“The ability to keep going in the face of failure is critical to success.”
-J.D. Roth, Get Rich Slowly
Truer words were never said.
On a very basic level, we’d all still be flopping around on our bellies like we did as an infant if we weren’t willing to continue on in the face of failure. How else does anyone ever learn to walk?
It’s a part of the process. We can’t get anywhere without failure, so why not embrace it?
Ok, maybe we don’t have to literally hug our failure, but it is worth taking a little time to consider the role failure plays in making us a success.
The people who are the most successful are the people that keep going anyway, learning from their experiences. They don’t wait to give things a try until they’re sure they’ll do it perfectly or until they’re sure they won’t fail, and they don’t stop at the first sign of a screw-up (or even the thousandth sign.)
Think about professional ice skaters or the folks who perform with Cirque du Soleil. Do you think there’s a person there that hasn’t fallen flat on their faces, multiple times? Maybe even breaking some bones in the process? You just can’t learn to do some things without falling down.
We don’t have to be perfect. We’re going to fail, sometimes over and over again. And then one day we will do spectacular things.
Those spectacular things may make a crowd cheer, or they may fill us with a quiet sense of pride in a job well done. Either way they’re worth doing.
Posted in Success on 12.02.09 with 4 comments.
Since we’re discussing mission statements on my site today (thanks for commenting, by the way), I’ll share a portion of my own mission statement with you:
“I will embrace and forget failure – it will light the way.”
I chose those words very carefully, and in the same spirit as your post today. The best metaphor I can think of for failure is a torch or oil lamp of some sort–the more we fail, the more the torch is fueled and the farther down the cave we can see.
I absolutely love the title of this post–not just for the humor, but for the underlying tenderness. I really like Wojciech’s analogy above as well. Failure is so key to learning and growing, yet we have such a tendency to rage at ourselves over it. I love the image of hugging that very thing we normally disdain, because it’s so necessary to move forward in life.
Without failure we would never learn. I have been failing at getting experience in personal finance for a long time. However, I have been learning a lot along the way about how attention to details matter so much.
That is not all. I realized that reaching out to others in the time of trouble is crucial. Some things you just cannot do along.
Those are just a few examples. Key when failing to sit down and ask why. Why are you were you are? Why are you doing what you are doing? What can you do differently? Become aware of why you fail so you can recognize the failure in the future and take the right steps to prevent it.
Keep writing!
Best,
Tomas
Wojciech, I really like the torch metaphor, that’s a good way to look at it.
CF, I’m glad you liked the title
Tomas, that’s a good point about realizing that reaching out to others in the time of trouble is crucial. We can’t do everything alone, and even if we could, why would we want to?