How Not To Make Failing Fatal — Create Opportunities

Every failure creates new opportunities just as does every success

Most people will agree that success creates new opportunity but it will take a transformed mind to believe same about failure.

Our society has regimented our thinking to only look out for opportunities in places or circumstances that we feel success resides. Unfortunately, this has not really done us much good, especially if you consider how derailed this upcoming generation has become with failure-phobia.

On the contrary, Loa Tzu, a philosopher and poet of ancient China once said [Tweet ““Failure is the foundation of success, and the means by which it is achieved.””] This, therefore implies that it is not in all cases that success comes without a sting of failing. Napoleon Hill once stated, “Opportunity often comes disguised in the form of misfortune, or temporary defeat.”

I once read a story about how ‘Post-It’ Note, the popular sticky note was discovered. In 1968, Spencer Ferguson Silver, an American chemist, was working on a new type of glue when he mixed different chemicals together that led to glue that didn’t stick very well. The adhesive’s grip was strong enough to hold papers together, but weak enough to allow the papers to be pulled apart again without being torn. More importantly, the adhesive could be used again and again.

Instead of looking at this as strictly a failure, he looked for the opportunity within it. Eventually this lousy sticking glue resulted to what is known as ‘Post-It’ Note after 5 years of consistent failures to convince colleagues. He collaborated with Arthur Fry to come up with the concept of these sticky notes. Spencer is now named on over 20 US patents; but his most significant invention was not an immediate success. Today, there is even a website full of other opportunities.

It was Spencer’s failure that created the opportunity to discover the Post-It Notes. Unfortunately, we always fail to look out for opportunities.

One lesson from today’s reflection is that ‘opportunities do not always lurk in the places we expect, waiting for us to pick them up, sometimes they are hidden in those times we fail’.

I am sharing this because I want you to know that you are bigger than any failure; that in your failure is an opportunity; that something good can still come out of what you are facing today, big enough to turn your dreams around.

If you will not take this piece as one of those pep-talks to make you feel good, then it could change your life. All I want you to begin to do from today is, whenever you encounter any difficulty of failure, just ask God to show you the opportunity that He wants to create out of it. This alone can give your life a whole new and lots of meaning.

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