It’s Time to Redefine Your Failure
Failure isn’t what you think it is.
Last year I’ve started a podcast with my friend. Hi, Tami!
Amongst many topics that we talked about in our first season, one of the most important ones to us was Redefining Failure. You can listen to the episode here.
Why it was important to us?
Failure is a part of being human. It’s the stepping stone to success. There is no other way to succeed unless you failed before.
“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Michael Jordan
Failure and success seem to be two sides of one coin. If you don’t succeed, you inevitably failed. Is that true in real life? Are things really that black and white?
Is there such thing as failure?
Most certainly, yes. However, it needs to be re-defined.
In order to re-define failure, you must first define it. And in order to define failure, you must define success.
From your earliest age on, you probably learned that if you lose the game — you fail. Meaning if you don’t win, you don’t succeed. If you don’t succeed, you fail.
It’s the game of dualities. There doesn’t seem to be a way around it. There is nothing in between. It’s either-or.
Let’s take a game of chess as an example. If you ever played chess, you can attest that you’ve learned the most when you lost. Hopefully, you made a recap of your moves, analyzed it with your friendly opponent, and learned how you could make better moves next time. Failure? I don’t think so.
The only time you fail is when you miss the learning opportunity.
Life is happening in such a way, that you are constantly experiencing something so that you can learn from it and evolve.
In that sense you can say there is no failure, there is only evolution.
To a certain point, you can learn from other peoples’ failures as well.
Your goal should be to be surrounded by people (mentors, authors from books, etc.) that know more than you. They failed so many times, that they’ve succeeded. They’ve passed through the things you’re going through and you can now learn faster and possibly avoid the same mistakes.
That’s why you are reading all these articles on how to write faster/better; how to think of the best title; how to improve your views or reading time; should you publish alone or with the publications; etc.
You are doing the right thing! You are learning from the experiences of others. Medium is such a great platform when it comes to learning. You can experience (second-hand) the best and the worst things that someone went through. However, it is only useful if you take something from it and actually follow the advice.
Still, even with the advice of others, you must be prepared to burn your own skin.
It is only useful if you actually sit down and write yourself if writing is where you want to succeed.
This leads us back to the beginning. Another important thing is to define success for yourself. If you don’t define your goal you will miss it.
Not defining your goal will not help you to achieve it. It just a primitive defense mechanism: “If I don’t define a goal, I can’t fail.” The truth can’t be further away.
To finish it off: You need to accept that there is no way around failing. But there is a way around thinking about what a failure is. So don’t be afraid of trying again and again.
If you like reading articles like this, consider joining Medium for only $5.00 a month! You’ll get full access to all of my writing and million other articles. Joining Medium through my referral link will support me (and other writers) and won’t cost you anything extra!
