Failure is often frowned upon if not outright feared, and many of us wish that everything we tried our hand at went smoothly at the first attempt. In reality, we fail more often than we don’t, and that is actually a good thing. No one is born a master, and without failure there would be no success. If we embrace the art of failing forward, we can and will become happier and stronger versions of ourselves.

This post is a part of the The Beauty Of… series which concentrates on shifting our focus away from the negatives in life and towards finding the positives and improving certain aspects of a situation so that we will actually enjoy it.

SHIFT YOUR MIND

: Why Failure Is The Key To Success :

Many people look longingly at the success stories of others, but what they see is only the end of their journey. We marvel at what they have and wish we could have the same – be as content, have the same cozy home, live in an equally loving relationship, etc. What we tend to ignore in all this, is the fact that the road leading up to where these people are today was paved with numerous bumps – and their secret to success was their perseverance and their will to never give up.

:1. Failing Is Essential For Living:

Without failing and trying again – sometimes over and over and over again – there would be no life as we know it.

Being resilient to failure is what drives us forward and makes us stick to a goal even if we haven’t reached it on the first try. It’s almost scary to think about the many things we wouldn’t have achieved if we had given up too soon – both as mankind as well as as individuals.

Learning to walk, learning to speak, learning to write – all of these actions are normal to (most of) us. If we had approached failure as children the same way we often do as adults, however, we would have achieved none of it.

As children, we don’t carry around the doubt that we can achieve things – we see or think of something and naturally know deep down in our hearts that we can reach it. The question is not if but when.

Likewise, failing at trying isn’t regarded as something negative but as something positive – yet another step closer to where we want to be, and the chance to learn from what we did to make it better the next time around.

:2. Failing Encourages Self-Development:

If everything is always given to us without us having to work and make an effort for it, then that experience won’t allow us to grow. Additionally, we often don’t appreciate the result the same way we would if we had tried and failed until we finally succeeded. Things we receive at no cost or or effort from us, simply don’t carry the same value.

Failure tends to also make us more humble as we’re conscious of the struggle and focus that others who tried the same thing experienced as well. We might even develop compassion for other people and sympathize with their struggles because we can relate to them.

Quite often, it opens up our minds to other perspectives and approaches as thinking outside the box might help us find the solution to the task at hand when everything we’ve been able to come up with on our own has failed.

:3. Failing Makes You Become Better:

Failing makes us better. We make mistakes and by doing so figure out what obviously doesn’t work. Going forward, every time we try again, we will tweak something about our approach to receive better results.

By failing over and over again, we little by little become experts at what we do in a way, until one day it all falls into place and that thing we’ve tried finally works out.

Some of us might take longer to reach our goal, and for others, it goes a lot quicker, so the most important ingredient is patience.

Then some fail once and never try a second time. This is unfortunate and such a shame because it is a numbers game. The more often we fail, the closer we are to the finish line. We don’t call it failing forward for no reason.

:4. Failing Is Never Permanent:

Failing at something naturally carries the option of succeeding at it as well. We might not be quite ready to reach our goal just yet for the lack of the right tools – but the solution is out there. If it wasn’t, other people would not have been able to succeed at it either, and if there is only one person in the world who did what we are aiming to do, you know it actually can work.

An interesting way to look at failing is to think of it as a process. We haven’t failed until we put things down and give up for good. As long as we keep on trying and adjusting our modus operandi, we’re still in the game, on our journey, on the path to where things can work out.

We don’t need to stop where we have failed. We are the ones who decide what to do next and whether failure is the end of it or if we keep going. We can change things, and turn them around. And sometimes, what we deem to be a failure along the way can even turn out to be our biggest success in the end (Post-Its and Viagra were discovered by accident as well by the way).

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It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.

Joanne Rowling

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REACH YOUR GOAL

: How To Deal With Failure :

Failing is inevitable in life unless we decide to not even bother trying. That on the other hand would not be an ideal way to go through life either because we would miss out on so many amazing experiences along the way.

:1. Regret Always Outweighs Failure:

Let’s do a thought experiment: Imagine you go to the doctor for a routine checkup and are told you only have three more months to live. How would that make you feel?

If you’re like me – and probably most people on this planet – the emotion that would overtower all others would be regret. Regret over all the things we haven’t done, all the experiences we put off until who-knows-when, and all the words we wish we had spoken out loud instead of only thinking them in our head.

According to Bronnie Ware who wrote the book The Top Five Regrets Of the Dying, the most prominent regret dying people have on their deathbed is that they wish they had dared to live a life true to themselves, and to me, that is directly linked to the fear of failure.

It becomes more obvious when we ask another question: What would I try out if I knew with absolute certainty that I couldn’t fail at it?

These are the things we should pay close attention to because they are close to our hearts, and the only reason we’re shoving them away or telling ourselves they’re not that important is that we’re afraid of trying.

But wouldn’t it be worse to one day look back at your life and ask yourself what could have been if only you had been brave enough?

:2. Failing Makes You Less Afraid:

We all love our comfort zones, the areas in our lives that we feel comfortable and secure in. We know how things work and what usually happens, and there is nothing that surprises us (negatively).

The thing about comfort zones, though, is that they look cozy from the outside but are like a sticky honey trap on the inside. We think they are what we want and need, but in reality, they are anything but.

While we feel safe staying put in place, this will eventually backfire. The more we avoid doing things outside of our routine, the more we start to fear the unknown. There are so many things that can go wrong, and so much stuff that we cannot control, right?

Before we know it, our formerly safe world has shrunk to a tiny island that feels like a cage. Let’s make a conscious effort to break free again.

Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “Do one thing every day that scares you.”, and that is a pretty wise bit of advice. If once a day is too scary, going with once a week is perfectly fine, too.

Things won’t always go as planned, and we will stumble over obstacles we didn’t anticipate. But little by little our little island will grow, the cage door will open, and eventually, our comfort zone will grow bigger with every failure we have overcome.

:3. Failing Forward Actually Exists:

Failing forward is actually a thing. There is no final point in time where failing at something is ultimate, and where we have reached a final stop.

If doing something one way didn’t work, there are still a million other ways out there that we can try, and all of them are valid options.

This isn’t math, where only a single solution is the correct one. This is life, where we can take numerous paths that all end up at the same destination. And that’s the beauty of trying something out, failing, and adjusting our ways before trying again.

And who’s to say something was a failure anyway? Every time we try something and don’t get the result we wanted, we will have learned something else because of it. Maybe it was just a logical step on the path to something bigger.

If we fall, it’s no big deal. It only will be if we decide to not get up again.

:4. Failing DOES NOT Make You A Failure:

This might be the most important realization we can have regarding failure, and if you only take one thing away from this post, please let it me this:

Just because you’ve failed at something doesn’t mean that you, as a person, have become a failure. We can fail at something, but we cannot fail as someone – never let anyone tell you that.

By the way, there is no universally valid definition of what failure is anyway. Five people could look at exactly the same person or situation, and three of them would see it as a failure while two would think of it as a success or a step in the right direction.

It’s simply a matter of perspective, and in that way, I love how Bob Ross used to look at his goof-ups while painting. Whenever small parts of his paintings didn’t turn out the way he wanted (yes, it happens to the best of us), he regularly referred to them as happy accidents and just went on.

Let’s learn from him, show ourselves some love and compassion, and deal with our mistakes, and failures the same way: They’re happy little accidents, and we’ll do better next time.

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