You must accept failure, and use it to succeed.
“Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm”
— Winston Churchill
Success in life sometimes involves a complete change of perception. Instinctively, you don’t like failure. I must confess that I’m like you. And we’re not the only ones, because no one likes to fail in life.
Failure is often frowned upon in our society. It is true that we live in a world where only winners are glorified.
This creates a distortion of reality, because many come to think that those who succeed are always successful. This is because you are only shown the end result when people succeed.
So you miss the point: the underside of the iceberg.
Success is the tip of the iceberg, and it represents only 10% of the whole process that led to success. The bulk of the process is made up of failures that serve as the basis for the great future success that everyone envies.
You’re Gonna Fail Sooner or Later
In your life, you have to keep in mind that you will fail sooner or later. It’s a virtually obligatory passage for everyone. Warren Buffett failed many times. Steve Jobs had a monumental failure when he was fired from Apple, the company he founded, in the mid-80s.
In short, everyone fails at some point in life.
If you don’t fail often enough, you’re just not ambitious enough. You’re content to achieve simple things that you know the outcome of before you even begin.
Elon Musk, one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time, is a reference in terms of taking risks to innovate. Here is his position on the link between failure and innovation:
“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing you are not innovating.”
— Elon Musk
Failure is an option that should not cause you to back down.
If you don’t fail often enough, you don’t innovate and don’t try anything bold. By taking few risks, you will never achieve great success.
A Lot of People Have a Bad Relationship in the Face of Failure
The main problem is that many people have a bad relationship in the face of failure. They mistakenly believe that it is shameful to fail. Moreover, they think that failure is permanent.
Failure does not make you a loser.
Failure shows that you have tried something difficult. You did not succeed in what you set out to do, but that is perfectly normal. No one always succeeds on the first try.
Jeff Bezos totally failed with his Fire Phone in 2014. Jeff Bezos may be a great guy and have been a huge success with Amazon, but he didn’t succeed with the Fire Phone.
The Fire Phone never found its way into the smartphone industry.
If Jeff Bezos has the right to fail, you have the right to fail too. Just as Jeff Bezos had no shame in admitting his failure in this area, you should do the same when you fail.
Honestly admitting failure is the first step for those who will be successful later.
The Difference Will Be Your Reaction to Your Failures
You must not be afraid of being judged by others when you fail. You must remain proud, and have complete confidence in yourself. If someone tells you about your failures, you’ll only have to answer what Nelson Mandela said to critics:
“Do not judge me by my success, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.”
— Nelson Mandela
Never let others judge you by your failures. It doesn’t make sense, because everyone fails. So it’s something we all have in common.
On the other hand, it is by the way you react to failure that you will be able to make the difference compared to 99 percent of the people in this world.
99 percent of people are going to give up at the first failure, and lament their fate.
That may seem like a huge number to you, but I think it’s really not far off the mark.
By accepting your failure, you can immediately analyze the reasons behind it. You will be able to understand what you missed. Better yet, you will be able to prepare a new plan to do better next time.
Successful People Use Failure to Their Advantage
Failure is, therefore, a great source of learning. With failure, you will learn more about yourself, but also about the success you are trying to achieve. By coming up with a new plan after failure, you will have a better chance of success because you will know what is not working.
Successful people always move forward after failure by trying new things.
Following a failure, you can return to the same goal by changing your approach.
Or you can do what Jeff Bezos did with his Fire Phone. He learned from his failure. Jeff Bezos realized that the smartphone market might not be the right market for him to target at that
Rather than lose all the work done on this project, Jeff Bezos redirected his teams and all the accumulated knowledge to his voice assistant Alexa.
Jeff Bezos felt the opportunity to make a name for himself on intelligent connected loudspeakers, so he chose to use his failure to move into this more promising area.
Today, Alexa is a huge success and dominates this growing field ahead of Google and Apple.
You Must Seek Failure in Order to Achieve Success
Without his failure with the Fire Phone, could Jeff Bezos have been a huge success with Alexa? It’s impossible to know for sure, but chances are he never had the idea of going into this field.
You have to see failure as something important in your path to success.
Failure is always a good thing as long as you can accept it and learn from it to help you do better the next time.
Some people say that you don’t have to fail for succeeding. I disagree. This implies that you are either a genius or a person who doesn’t try anything bold and innovative.
Since I believe there are very few geniuses in this world, I think most of them are people who don’t try anything ambitious enough in their lives.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s always a shame when you don’t realize your full potential by staying in your comfort zone.
You must be one of those who dare to step out of this zone by considering failures as a foundation for future great success.
Be ambitious, dare to exceed your limits, work hard, accept failures, be resilient in trying to improve next time, and you will achieve great success some day, that’s for sure.
Be careful what you say to yourself because your brain is a super computer and your self thought is the program it will run, so if you tell yourself you are not good at something that's what your brain will run
