Is failure the best thing that could happen to us?
Failure doesn’t exist. It’s only an illusion of our mind.
How cool would it be to say:” Yeah, that sentence is so true”?
I mean, do you know somebody happy to fail?
I sure don’t, so I asked myself:” Why are most of us so scared to fail?”. The answer was easier than I thought: They didn’t teach us how to deal with failure.
Now think about this: when was the first time you failed? Probably in school, right?
And what’s the problem with this?
The problem is that failure was used as a threat:” If you don’t study, I’ll give you a bad mark,” or even:” If you don’t behave well, I’ll give you a note.”
Then there’s the most dangerous threat, the threat that could be the one that we’ll take with us for our entire life:” If you keep going like this, you’ll sure fail the year.”
Let’s talk about it: how much losing a year could affect somebody’s life: you’ll have to repeat the year with younger people that you don’t know, you’ll always be remembered as the guy who failed a year, and so on.
All this to say: how would it be to deal with failure and learn from it?
Well, let me tell you.
What if we could deal with failure?
Let’s make an example of someone who did it:
Gary Dahl, an advertiser, had the idea to sell a rock as a pet (the famous pet rock) and asked a lot of banks to finance this idea.
All the banks gave him the same answer:” Your idea won’t work. Don't waste our time.”
He didn’t give up and made a mortgage on his house for a second time so that he could buy little spaces in magazines to promote and sell his idea.
For the first months, he sold zero pet rocks, all this until, in December, he used his last money to buy a little space in a magazine, and boom: everyone wanted a pet rock for Christmas.
He sold about 1.5 million pet rocks.
Dahl is the perfect example of a person who accepted his idea of failing without ceasing to believe in what he knew would work.
Imagine how your life could become if you could deal with failure like Gary Dahl.
Now, I want to explain how most of us react to failure.
How we deal with failure
Failure has not only psychological consequences but also physical ones: when we fail our body releases cortisol, a hormone that makes us feel demotivated, anxious, and, of course, more stressed.
And let me tell you: if you keep producing high levels of cortisol you’ll get sick and anxious: It’s very unwealthy of us.
Besides, when we feel like we succeeded, our body releases some endorphins, a hormone that stimulates us and makes us feel we want to keep going.
Ok but how can we can’t always succeed in life, so how do we deal with failure?
How I’m making my failures look like victories
The first thing I like to do when something doesn’t work out is to make a ‘crime scene’ of my failure and analyze every single detail:
What can I learn from it?
What are the mistakes that I made?
How can I do better the next time?
And so on.
Trust me: just by doing this you’ll feel a lot better and improved.
The second thing I’ve learned to do to deal in a better way with failure is to improve your physical and mental situation: start doing exercise, meditating, or doing yoga. You also can eat well to make your body feel better.
To improve your mental situation there’s an easy thing to do: laugh.
I know that sometimes it’s hard to find something to laugh about, but don’t worry because our bodies can’t tell the difference between a real laugh and a fake one. So if you start laughing at something that isn’t funny for you, for example, a not-funny joke from your uncle, your body will release some endorphins and lower your cholesterol levels.
Now I don’t know if you’ve already failed in something, or you’re just scared to fail and haven’t already tried. The thing that I want you to do is to try.
Remember:
there are no failures in life, but only experiences.
I hope you enjoyed reading my article. Let me know in the comments if you did and also if you found this useful. I’d love it if you’d let me know how you’re dealing with failure.
I hope you’re having a good day.
