Let’s face it, anyone who has attempted anything knows that eventually they will have to deal with failure. It never goes right the first time. Nothing ever does. We often do nothing instead of facing failure, it’s human nature and a big dose of ego protection. Over time this avoidance becomes a habit we need to break, and the best way to do that is to fail more often.
How often have you EVER thought about failing more often? That sounds ridiculous! And to our inner perfectionist – you know the one that sees everything everyone else is doing and thinks we must be perfect to measure up – the thought of more failure can be too much to bear. I liked these words from Samuel Beckett as they are almost pushing us to fail more, fail better! It’s a really liberating mindset! Forget perfection, do what you can to fail, do it often, and do it better than anyone else.
This makes me think about Thomas Edison. He tested over ten thousand filament options before he found the one that would work in his light bulb. When he was asked about all his failures – thousands and thousands and thousands – he said, “I did not fail. I found ten thousand things that did not work.” He saw failures as part of the process to get to success. Genius!
Maybe the reason we give up is because we have conditioned ourselves to dislike failure. We take it personally and somehow chalk it up as personal attribute, instead seeing it is a byproduct of being successful. And if we listen to Thomas Edison and Samuel Beckett, we need to embrace failure AND feel good when it happens. (That’s a tall order!) By making mistakes, failure and fumbles part of the process, we can leap past them to the good stuff, the successful moments, the times when it eventually goes right. No one is perfect…no one. No one gets it all right the first time, the second time or even the third time.
I find it a relief to understand that. I have had dasterdly mistakes in my life, some that haunt me more than others. I am learning to embrace, accept AND keep going. Those pitfalls, foibles, fumbles and big whopping misses are part of my path to success, in whatever I do. They make me – me! They have helped define who I am and what I know. And they keep me humble and charged to keep going until I get it right.
So let me encourage you today to fail, fail more, and fail REALLY big! Then take a deep breathe, learn what you need to do differently next time, and keep going. It is not our successes that define us as someone other people admire, it is how we handle the failures that prove our character and chutzpah! No one ever thinks about the person who made a mistake and gave up…they have disappeared into obscurity. It is the person who stumbled, fell, got up and kept going that we truly want to be around. I can do that! You can too…so get out there and fail better!
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