In our culture, we tend to condemn failing. Whether it is in school, at work or at home, failing often isn’t seen as acceptable.
Failure makes us feel incompetent and insignificant. It makes us feel like there is something wrong with us.
After spending countless hours working on a project or training for something, it doesn’t feel good to fail or lose. It makes all the time and effort feel wasted.
Everyone wants to win and succeed, but if we always won and succeeded, we wouldn’t know how to handle failure when it happens — and it will happen at some point.
In reality, failing is a natural part of life.
Andrew Brand | Argonaut
Throughout childhood, we fail many times. It’s like falling down when we learn to ride a bicycle, accidentally starve a pet lizard or lose soccer games. But when we were kids, we didn’t let failure stop us. We let our parents put a bandage on our scraped knee and we hopped right back on the bike. We were determined. We persevered until we saw results.
Failure has always been a part of our journey. Failure is how we grow.
Failing at something doesn’t mean you’re a failure. Maybe the competition was fierce, maybe the judges or teachers were hypercritical and biased in their evaluation — there are countless reasons for failing. But failing doesn’t mean you are unintelligent, incompetent or insignificant.
The key is to leverage your fail and turn it into momentum and inspiration to not give up. Failure is unavoidable. When we fail, we can either wallow in the defeat or use it as motivation to keep going and do better.
Sometimes we need to learn how not to do something before we can learn to do it properly.
When I was learning how to drive a manual car, I discovered all the ways to stall it before I discovered the techniques to shift it smoothly. It didn’t feel good to be sitting in the middle of a busy intersection with a stalled car while I was frantically trying to get rolling again. It also didn’t feel good to roll halfway into a ditch after failing to put the car in reverse. But, through those moments I gained the determination to get better.
It took years for me to get the hang of driving manual. By choosing to not give up day after day, I finally figured it out. Now I’m a proficient driver of manual cars.
Every failure is an opportunity to learn and grow. But we get to choose whether we utilize the opportunity or not.
When we learn how to handle losing we learn how to win. Every Olympic athlete has lost at some point. The ones who went on to receive medals just learned how to use their loss to propel them forward.
Don’t waste your failures. They can be valuable. Every failure is a chance to reevaluate and do better next time.
Failure is not an excuse to quit trying.
Andrew Brand can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @theandrewbrand