Adapting to our failures

Failure can turn out to be one of the biggest barriers any of us will encounter on the path to success. Depending on the magnitude of the failure, the amount of devastation it causes to an individual varies. Gertrude Stein states in their book, Failure, “A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.” In other words, we shouldn’t be destroyed by failure or doomed to reenact the failure, but to learn from it and adapt for the future. Failure can cause a major internal battle within a person. Understanding what it means to fail, and how to process that, is a key factor in being able to adapt.

Gertrude also explains that we put ourselves in danger in the fact that most of us, at some point in our life in some position, are willing to fail and/or are expecting to fail. As I have previously stated, in order to become master adapters, we need to change our outlook on failure. If we expect to fail at something, and I certainly have done that, it is harder to learn from the failure. This leaves us no room to be able to adapt to a similar situation in the future, leading to even more failure.

Another point Gertrude expands upon is the fact that failure tends to bring us success, I believe this is due to our ability to adapt. Adaptation is based tremendously on our past experiences and what we have learned from them. If an experiment goes exactly how we wished it to, do we really learn anything? We learn that our prediction is correct, but coming across a very different result, provokes a much more interesting opportunity to learn. To learn is to adapt nowadays, and by adapting to these new results, we are growing our own personal knowledge.

Stein, G. (2016) Failure. Oxford, NY. Oxford Printing Press.