4 Things You Can Learn From Failure
I’ve failed at a lot of things in my life, and so have you. Failure is just a fact of life and something that everyone has in common.
Yet despite its unavoidable presence in our lives, we all still fear it. Every time we dare to dream, to take a risk or stretch ourselves further, the spectre of failure lurks at our shoulders, holding us back. Because it’s better to not have tried than to have failed, right?
Wrong.
Every failure is a valuable experience, and there are so many lessons to be learned from falling flat on your face:
You learn to pick yourself up.
The secret to learning from failure is that the failure itself doesn’t matter. It’s the bit afterwards that teaches you the biggest lesson.
Because the ability to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and try again is something everyone needs to learn. Life isn’t always plain sailing and there will always be obstacles, so the ability to overcome them and persevere is invaluable, and something that you can only learn by coming face to face with failure.
You learn courage.
Just because you leapt and fell, doesn’t make the leap itself any less commendable. It’s commonly said that we’re more likely to regret the things we didn’t do in life rather than the things we did, and I believe that to be true.
If you somehow mustered the courage to try, then, whatever happens, you haven’t ever truly failed. Because you were strong enough and brave enough to take that leap, to risk falling, and then to get back up.
You learn how to fail better and then succeed.
A better way to see failure is as practice, and everyone knows practice makes perfect.
No one ever sat at a piano for the first time and played a perfect tune. Instead, piano players sit at the piano every day and learn through their failures how to play the tune correctly.
In other words, they learn how to fail better until they succeed.
You learn to appreciate success.
Without the concept of failure, success is meaningless.
If you could never possibly do something wrong or fail at anything, then that isn’t a success. That’s just doing something, and it wouldn’t bring the joy and pride that actual, against-the-odds success does.
So to have experienced the feeling of failure only serves to teach you how to properly appreciate success when it comes your way. Because it will!
Failure is simply a precursor to eventual success, an unavoidable fact of life. So learn what you can from it, don’t dwell on it, and go out into the world and try again.
Maybe you’ll fail again, maybe you’ll fail again ten more times, but nothing worth having was ever achieved with no effort. Just fail again, better, until you get it right.
