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In today’s podcast, Episode 25: Failure To Success, I discuss why failure is necessary on your journey to success. Every failure provides a learning opportunity.
Do you want to be in the same place a year from now? If not I have the solution.
Episode 25: Failure To Success
What is failure? How do we define it? In the dictionary failure has many meanings, it can be defined as a lack of success or one that has failed. I believe this is too broad a definition and I refer back to some of my previous posts where I talked about success. Success being different for each person means also that failure can be different for different people. I prefer to define failure as a necessary building block on the road to success. Very few people have immediate success when they begin a new venture.
No Success Is Without It’s Failures
We must come to understand that failure is important and necessary to succeed. Everything is a learning process and I like to refer to the process as a journey. We all start out on a journey with a full pack of food and gear. The first steps are taken on a nice comfortable well-worn path as we are full of energy. At some point along the way, the path becomes overgrown with vines and covered in rocks. Our food supply begins to dwindle as our journey becomes more laborious. We don’t arrive at our destination before winter sets in and we have to turn back. Our journey is a failure.
We didn’t quit on our journey; we are just temporarily delayed. Our failure has presented itself as a learning lesson that our journey will take longer and we need to begin earlier in the year before winter sets in. Most journeys to success follow the same path, begin, fail, learn, and begin again.
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Mistakes We Make
One of the biggest mistakes I believe we make in our society is not teaching children about failure. We plant the idea of perfection in their heads by saying things like, “don’t color outside the lines.” We teach that failure is a bad thing, children don’t learn how to deal with failure when it happens. This can put a lot of pressure on a young mind. Instead, let’s begin to teach children that failure is a steppingstone and to learn from it. Utilize failure in order to succeed.
In conclusion, the idea that I would like you to take away from this article is to get rid of your fear of failure. Embrace your failures, use them as a learning tool, and make changes to your plan. Remember that your goal doesn’t change, only your plan. With every failure, you will find yourself one step closer to becoming the person you are meant to be. The only way you can truly fail at anything is to quit. Never quit.
Listen to Episode 25: Failure To Success above to hear more about embracing your failures. Don’t forget to like, comment, and follow. Get my weekly podcast by subscribing to your favorite podcast channels.
I used to think I thought around problems, and looked at things from all manner of perspectives. While working in an organisation that helped people experiencing mental distress I found out how important having many different tools in your toolbox to help are. One day I said to a colleague “Think outside the box”, and quick as a fox he replied, “What box?” This blew my mind in terms of how I think about problems. The potential solutions I know about and can see are only a fraction of the actual solutions there could ever be—and they are solutions to one problem where there could in fact be many more!
Looking at a failure as a stepping stone to success as you’ve said here is so important, and it brings me back to a word you use so aptly all the time here on your blog: PERSEVERANCE.
Thank you for sharing another really important lesson and encouraging us to really focus on learning it.
Thank you, Hamish for listening. I always appreciate your thoughtful comments.
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