Have You Hugged Your Failure Today?

Have you hugged your failure today?

Ok, maybe we don’t have to literally hug our failure like it’s a cuddly little teddy bear, but it IS worth taking time to consider the role failure plays in making us a success.

“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?

Who’s most successful?

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.

Worth doing

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.

3 comments

  • Anastasia

    Very clever… thank you! Yes, it’s all a cycle… and IMHO, outgrowing a job or a relationship may be taken as either failure or success. In our society staying put looks admirable, but if the person is ready for the next step, letting go of the old and embracing the new is inevitable. Great post.

  • Nice thought! My second ebook is a flop, but I’m still embracing it as further practice with ebooks. :-) Life is just a series of failures and successes and hopefully learning from both…

  • Failure in anything we do can really be frustrating. But at the end of the day, we have to be positive and ponder on the lessons we learned so as not to commit the same failure again.