Failure is at the root of all ... not succeeding (!). Profound, huh? Failing makes us feel inadequate. It saps our energy and tells us to give up. Who did we think we were, anyway? We hate failure! We try to pretend it's not there - laughing at us, but secretly we know it is.
But really, failure has had a bad rap. It's trite but true:
There's no such thing as failure, only feedback
If you try something, and it didn't work, have you failed? No - that attempt failed - sure - but you haven't failed until you stop trying. Now. You can see this as an endless stream of kicks in the teeth - to be endured and despised - but why go to all that bother? Why not see each endeavour as an experiment with reality. In exchange for your efforts, reality will reward you with some information about its true nature. Feedback.
Significant success is guaranteed to involve some "failures" along the way. Maybe quite a few. Take that as a given from the outset. Watch those experiments carefully; listen to what they tell you. Apply a fun mindset to find creative ways forward - to collect more information about reality - to get to know it better, and to make it your friend. Happy resilience in the face of failure is what you need to succeed.
Churchill said success is the art of moving from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.
Zig Ziglar says Let failure be your teacher, not your undertaker.
And they say (anonymously, it seems) that success might be only one more failure away.
So - if you're not succeeding, maybe you're not failing nearly often enough.
Go forth and screw up!
No comments:
Post a Comment