I have come across a number of quotes and articles recently, purporting that almost every successful business person has one or more ‘failures’ under their belt. Most agree that the success stories of these business owners can be directly attributed to ‘failing’ and that they would not be successful without those experiences.
If you have children, or can cast your mind back to when you were a child, you have probably witnessed that the most effective learning comes from children experiencing negative experiences for themselves. Children don’t learn what it feels like to lose a soccer game from reading about it or from you telling them about it. When they lose a game, they truly experience how it feels and often have a greater motivation to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
That’s not to say that in order to understand a situation or be successful you have to first fail at every possibly circumstance. But it does mean that you are more likely to be resilient, determined and motivated to do it better next time.
When you experience a failure, if you are smart, you will adapt what you’ve learnt from that situation to the next experience, even if it is a very different experience. This means that not only is there a positive and good outcome from the failure, each time you fail you can choose to learn everything you can from it and use it to achieve success.
James Cameron frames failure in an interesting way: “if you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success”
