As much as it hurts, failure is an important part of life. In short, failure is necessary. I have failed more times than I would want to admit. I can’t say that I enjoy failing, but through its life-altering lessons, failure moulds us into better persons. Without failure, we would be incapable of compassion, kindness, empathy and great achievement.
When we think of what failure is, we imagine things in a negative light. We see it as painful and that it inflicts agonizing pangs of remorse, regrets and guilt. But, for people that have known failure and have bounced from it, understand that in life failure is necessary for success. The most successful people in the world have failed the most times. You can’t go through life without failing at anything, and if you try to, then you’re not really living a life as a matter of fact. Falling down flat on our faces while taking risk is a part of life, it moulds us into who we are. Even a baby will fail a thousand times before finally mastering the art of walking.
The problem however is that society tends to celebrate the successes instead of highlighting the epic journeys towards success that are filled with tribulations, trials, setbacks, failures and upsets because it’s not as glamorous to talk about those things. Michael Jordan missed about 9000 shots throughout his career, lost over 300 games and 26 times when he was trusted to take the game winning shot he missed, and that’s why according to him he succeeds.
Why is it necessary to fail?
Failure is a steppingstone. It is necessary to fail. In fact, I will highlight 5 very powerful life lessons taught and instilled in us by failure
- Experience: The first major lesson gained from failure is experience. When we go through a situation and can walk away with forehand experience, it aids us in developing a deeper understanding of life. The experience of failure is truly invaluable as it completely alters our mind frame through the induction of pain. It makes us want to reflect on the real nature of things and their paramount importance in our lives, improving and transforming our future-selves.
- Knowledge: Failure is accompanied with firsthand knowledge. We can harness that knowledge in the future to overcome that very failure that has inflicted much pain in the first place. Nothing replaces knowledge gained from failure.
- Resilience: Failure helps to build resilience. With each failure we become more resilient. In order to achieve unprecedented success, we must know resilience. Because, if we try to think that we would succeed in the very first try, or even the first few attempts, then we’ve set ourselves up for a far more painful failure.
- Growth: When we fail, we grow and mature. We reach deeper meanings and understandings in our lives and why we do the things we do. This assists us to reflect and take things into clear perspective, developing meaning from painful conditions. Life has been designed for us to grow and improve. From the genetic fibers that moulds us into individual persons, into the fabric of society on a global scale, growth is a typical part of us. Without growth, we could not improve life on all fronts.
- Value: one very big lesson we can learn from life’s failures is the necessity to create an exceedingly high amount of value. Value, in fact lies at the heart of success and a lack of value is a fundamental pillar to more failure.
How to Recover From Failure
Many ways exists that can help one recover from failure. Once you’ve come to terms with what failure is, and its prospects in serving us rather than hinder us, you’ll open your heart and free your mind to experience the joy of failure.
- Ignore the naysayers. When you fail, without a doubt there will be people telling you, “You should have listened to me” and, “I told you so.”
- Understand that it’s okay to Fail. One of the major ways of recovering from failure is understanding that it’s all right to fail but not okay to give up.
- Using failure as a leverage: when you fail in life, you should consider it a leverage to not only recover from it, but to help push you forward in the future. Failure is a platform for growth that is simply unmatched.
To leverage failure, illuminate them to your mind. Pen down what you failed and why you failed. Are there deep enough meanings to your goals in the past? What could have been done differently? How will you now tackle those failures in the future when you face them? How will you learn from the past to assist you in shaping a bigger and brighter future? - Revisit your goals and seek to know how clear you were with your goals. Were they exact, precise and feasible? Were you able to visualize them in your mind?
- Spend time to analyze and adjust where necessary. Revisit your goals and redefine them.
- Create a massive action plan: Lay out a plan on how you’re going to achieve your goals. What will you do incase failure rears its ugly head next time?
Set up a solid action plan that will help you push past life’s hurdles and watch as you recover from setbacks or failures. At Nelumbo Consultancy we can help you setup a solid plan which will help you recover from a setback or failure. Contact us today let’s work on one.
