
How to fail successfully
Failure is not your friend, learning is.
I have something to tell you. I’ve failed. But more importantly — you’ve failed as well. And your parents have failed, and your friends have failed. And you know that super-cool person who you really admire? He/She has failed too.
But this is not news for you (I hope). By now, you already know that we all fail. For different reasons and at different projects. I’m not here to tell you that everything will be all right, that it’s ok to fail, and that you should get up after the failure and try again.

I’m here to tell you that failure is not really your friend. No one feels good when they fail, and people are not proud of themselves when they fail. Just think about it, of all your friends, how many do you know that talk about their failure? Think even about the closest friends. You know their successes, you know about that cool job they got, you know when they got the best grade, you know when they got promoted, but you don’t know about their failure, because, the thing is, we are not proud of being a failure.
When you meet a person and you ask him/her something about themselves, they always tell you all the best things. No one goes to tell you about that startup that they failed last year. No one brags about the project that they worked for years, just to find out is useless and no one wants to use their product.
Or when you finally meet a person who talks about their failure, it’s only because they have a follow-up story of how successful their new startup is or the new job they just got. No one shares a failure story that ends there.

Failure is inevitable, so you better make use of it
But since failure is going to be part of your life until, well, forever, you better make use of it. I’ve read many different posts about failure and how you should get up and keep on going. But that’s wrong, ignoring the failure you just faced, will make you fail again, for the same reason. The most important thing about failure is what you do the day after. After you find out that you have failed, after you are done with crying and blaming everyone else, after you go through the phase where you try to defend your decisions.
The learning starts when you confess to yourself that you’ve failed.
Because only after you admit to yourself that you’ve failed, is when you can really start learning from it. Take a paper and pen and write down all the things that went wrong. Write down the reasons why you failed, and then write down how it came to that. What decisions did you make and what made you make those decisions. And I’m serious, nothing will help and your failure will be a waste of time if you don’t write down what happened. You really need a pen and paper.
Failure is not your friend, learning is. Learning can come from both failure and success, and success often times comes after a lot of failed attempts, but only if we learn through the process. Otherwise, you fail at failing.
