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I am scared way more often than I am brave. I am uncomfortable much more frequently than I am comfortable. I am unsure about so much more than I am certain of. I have dropped many more balls than I have ever caught, and I have failed at more initiatives than I have succeeded. And it is because of this, not in spite of it, that I thrive.
We know that successful people, like everyone else, make mistakes, feel pain, quit, cry, lose and have all the same insecurities and self doubts that all human beings experience. We know success is not synonymous with perfection. We know this, but what is less known or less understood is what successful people do differently in the face of failure. Successful people learn from failure. Among many things, they learn that the goal is to play to win instead of desperately hoping not to lose. Here are three ways successful people use failure to achieve greater levels of success.
Successful people don’t define failure as the opposite of success; they define failure as the opposite of trying.
Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It’s vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear. – Michelle Obama, Becoming.
This feeling is what too often paralyzes us. Failure – or the fear of it – leads to indecision and stagnation; it causes people to outright resist change. People who try something and don’t succeed at it are not the failures in the world. I don’t see failure that way. While it is difficult to work hard for something that you don’t achieve, it is worse yet to not ever even try.
Successful people try. While they don’t succeed at everything, they succeed at enough. They make an honest effort to establish and achieve their goals. They are determined to push through, and while they don’t want to fail, they know they can’t succeed without trying.
Successful people get it. They recognize that the truest form of failure is what happens when you allow your fear of not achieving something to stop you from trying something new in the first place. When you allow the idea or fear of failure to cause you to resist change in an attempt to avoid all risk, you indeed become a failure – and the truly unacceptable kind at that.
Successful people are brave enough to embrace fear and smart enough not to give it too much power.
Brave people –the successful people – play to win while scared people just pray they don’t lose. Successful people understand that failure is not the boogeyman. It is not the worst thing in the world, and it is not something to be embarrassed by or ashamed of. Instead, failure is a critical component – if not the key component – to living your truth and realizing sustained and meaningful success.
Bravery is not defined by a lack of fear. Bravery is precisely what happens when we embrace our fears and push forward despite them. And even though many of us are scared more often than we are brave, what’s important is that we are brave enough to make the decisions and take the risks that matter.
And remember, while it is good to acknowledge your fears, you don’t want to give them power over your thinking and behaviors. Yes, the odds are usually stacked against us. The uncertainty, risk and ambiguity of it all feels so dog on daunting sometimes that so much inside us tells us it must be easier to not even try rather than try something new or different just to fail. Successful people get down and discouraged at times. We might even let a victim mindset creep in, but we don’t let it build up shop and stay there. Instead we apply these smart strategies to move forward.
Successful people decide that failure is indeed an option so they get comfortable with discomfort.
It is my contention that the moment people decide that failure is indeed not an option, they inherently decide that success is not either because creativity and innovation cannot thrive in a culture of fear and perfection. Once you go in with the idea that failure is not an option, everyone gets scared to be or do different. People dare not take the risk to fail or be rejected, and they don’t want to do things that might make themselves or others uncomfortable. This creates an environment with everyone striving for the ever-elusive result of perfection. And this – more than anything else – nearly guarantees failure along with lower levels of creativity and innovation.
Failure comes part and parcel with invention. It’s not optional. We understand that and believe in failing early and iterating until we get it right. – Jeff Bezos, Amazon, Business Insider
Not only do successful people embrace failure, they also decide to pay the price that true success costs. What does this mean? This price includes sacrifice, discipline and discomfort. It means they actively decide to live their truth and make choices that will advance their personal and professional goals – even when they know that their choices will be hard for themselves and others.
Many people have told me that they could/would/should be at a different or better place in their lives, but they didn’t want to disappoint a friend, a parent, a boss, a spouse, etc. They decided to make other people comfortable by allowing these people to decide what they should specialize in, whether they should marry, who they should marry, whether they should have children and how many, what their college major should be, what company they should work for and so forth.
These people – no matter how much money or status they have – are not successful because they are secretly so unhappy. I don’t think you can count yourself among the successful when you fail to make your own choices and ultimately give up your power to decide your own life. This behavior only leads to persistent unhappiness and internal conflict regardless of the shiny objects that people see from the outside.
Contemplate this…
- Is failure ever useful? If so, how can you leverage it to achieve greater levels of success?
- How do you define success? Is it about what you feel and experience internally or what others see or perceive externally?
- What have you failed at lately? If the answer is nothing, is it possible that you aren’t trying enough new and different things? Could it be that you are too risk averse?
