We have been taught to strive for success for as long as we can remember.
This is the directive beaten into our heads since we could understand language and it is one of the main goals we set for ourselves. We know that achieving mastery in a field is the way to go because it was told to us so often, that it became a core belief in our psyche. We were also told that the road to success is not an easy one and that we would have to endure many hardships along the way. This is all true, but the definition is incomplete. Success is on one side of the coin while failure is on the other and it is just as important as success in our development. Because we live in a comfort-based society, many of us learn to stay away from the stress and pain that failure brings and choose to avoid it in any way possible. This prevents us from building experience, mental toughness and the means to deal with the bigger problems that will inevitably hit every one of us, eventually. By avoiding the little failures in life, we set ourselves up for experiencing major pain later on.
In our fast-paced business-oriented world, the wide-spread idea is that the weak fall and are left behind by those still standing.
This mentality brings with it a sense of urgency and imminent danger when faced with making mistakes. You are seen as weak or unfit for the task if you don’t learn it fast enough. This puts pressure on the person who struggles with the task and who will eventually associate major pain to failure. It gives failing a bad reputation. It turns a natural part of the process of learning into a measuring tool that prematurely categorizes people into successful and unsuccessful, and it peer-pressures the latter category into remaining under-achievers. These people will start to believe that they cannot do it if they constantly hear it from others and proceed to internalize this belief. Once they believe that they cannot do it, they will fail and the belief gets reinforced by the failure. This is a downward spiral, a self-fulfilling prophecy that gains momentum exponentially and makes people feel stuck, overwhelmed, disempowered.
While we were taught how to deal with the hardships and the pain of failure, it is only the ones who have walked this road and reached their goal that understand one simple idea: failure is a necessary stepping stone on the road to success, not a wall that is meant to stop us. Let me repeat that: failure is necessary for success; you cannot achieve anything worthwhile without it, because you will not grow and when a real problem hits you, it will become painfully obvious how under-prepared you are.
On the flip side, changing the meaning we associate to failure can bring about great benefits. It is inevitable that we will face adversity in our journey and that makes failure a natural part of life. It pushes us beyond our comfort zone, forcing us to expand ourselves and our reality when what we already know or have mastered just isn’t enough to get through. There is a process of personal growth that we miss out on if we all that we manage is to get caught up in the emotions of failure. Growth happens on the edge of what we know or are comfortable with.
Just like with the negative interpretation of failure, where falling in a downward spiral that gets fueled and reinforced by our negative thoughts is almost certain, the opposite is also true. When we accept failure as a part of the learning process and welcome it because we know that it will make us grow, the lessons and mental grit that we derive from that also starts to build up, gain momentum and push us in an achieving state. A sense of understanding in the face of adversity is a great advantage over others and is a necessary quality for mastery over just about anything.
Failure can destroy you, or it can get you frustrated enough, determined or motivated enough to push through. This is a matter of perspective and also one of the most important decisions of your life because this decision will literally shape your future. I’m not trying to sound over-dramatic, this is a fact of life.
The way we choose to view failure is critical in overcoming problems.
If we frame it differently or, should I say, in a way that makes it possible for us to overcome it, failure becomes a friend, a silent teacher that pushes us to come up with our own answers to the problems that we are dealing with and prepares us to deal with even bigger problems that may come our way. This is the true purpose of failure, it is a learning tool and once we start seeing things that way, our life changes for the better.
