Everybody hates failure. But let me tell you that there are four things about failure to be happy about.
One, it is subjective. It is only you who can label what failure is for you. No one can define your own meaning of failure. Your perceptions of and response to your mistakes determine whether your actions are failure. Failure is created within us. I will quote Jan Christiaan Smuts and he said ‘a man cannot be defeated by his opponents but by himself.’ Failure is a state of mind.
Roger Crawford works as a consultant and public speaker. He has written two books and travels across America working with Fortune 500 companies and school districts. Before he was a consultant, he was a varsity tennis player for Loyola Maymount University. Is not that too much for a man? Would you be more impressed if I tell you that Roger Crawford has no hands and a foot? He was born with a condition called ectrodactylism. A thumb-like projection extending out of his right forearm served as his hands. He has no palms. Various medical professionals told Roger’s parents that he would never be able to walk; probably would not be able to take care of himself and would never leave a normal life. After recovering from shock, Roger’s parents were determined to give him the best chance possible to live a normal life. ‘You’re only a handicap as you want to be,’ his father used to tell him. Later Roger maintains that handicaps only disable us if we let them and that he believed that the real and lasting limitations are created in our minds not in our bodies.
Second, failure is inevitable. No one is spared from making mistakes or from failing. Alexander Pope once wrote, ‘to err is human, to forgive divine.’ But let us think that there are no mistakes in life, only lesson learned. Failures come as tests and will come back until we learn.
Third, failure is a process. Just like success, failure is not a destination, a place you will eventually arrive someday. Failure comes in the journey you take. It is how you deal with it that matters.
And fourth, failure is a friend. It may be quite hard to understand this at the start. Remember that failure does not take things away from you. Failure is a fertilizer; it aids our growth. It pushes us to edge of accepted performance. If you have been doing this certain thing for some time now and there has been no acceptable result, this wold lead you to rethink your actions and accept that what you are doing just cannot go on. Then failure teaches to innovate as needed.
The ability to innovate is vital for success. After learning the old system does not work anymore, we look for different ways to succeed. It took Thomas Edison to fail over 6,000 times before perfecting the first electrical bulb. If you want to succeed, you must learn to make adjustments to the way you do things and try again. Because we failed, we open all doors that might lead to success. The Home Depot, which has more than 760 stores employing 157,000 people with more than $30 million in sales, rose out of the ashes of failure. The owners Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank teamed up to start the Home Depot when Marcus was fired from work at Handy Dan. Maybe, if he was not fired from that job who knows whether he would have achieved the success he had today.
Now, I think those are enough and simple reasons why we need not be afraid of failing. It would not plunge us into a lake of sulfur.
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