How to Fail Your Way to Success and Embrace Obstacles

I have failed.

Not once and not twice; I have failed countless of times in my life. Each time, I wanted to collapse to the ground and cry my heart out.

In high school, I failed 2 International Science Olympiads, losing the chances to win a medal. I was a bench warmer in my basketball team. After getting admitted to the University of Cambridge a year ago, I failed to secure a scholarship.

But those times are gone.

After each and every failure, I somehow got up on my legs and moved forward. I won 6 International Science Olympiad medals, became a member of the Youth Basketball Team of Armenia, and did a crowdfunding campaign to gather the financing to study at the University of Cambridge.

Having traveled this strange path — coming from a developing country, Armenia — I realized that failure was an essential component of my success.

1. Failure Hurts

Pain, you break me down, you build me up, a Believer, Believer — Imagine Dragons.

I hate losing more than anything. Failure keeps my heart on fire. I am motivated and ready to embrace any challenge that life throws at me after failure. Every. Single. Time.

When I came home empty-handed from International Astronomy Olympiad 2013, I got off from Facebook. I started studying every day, even at evenings.

Failure is obnoxious and painful.

But it’s that exact pain that gives us the drive to succeed. It’s pain that gives us reason to wake up at 6 AM every morning and practice our art. It’s pain that gives us motivation to reject our friends’ invitation for an evening drink-over.

It’s pain that makes all the difference between success and apathy…

2. Failure is Inevitable

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 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.

There are Mark Zuckerbergs in the world; the people who are 1 out of 1. They succeeded right away and became world leaders. But 1 out of 1 success is often due to luck.

There is always a chance that you will fail. Sometimes, your business or exam can hit the probability of success. Other times, things can go awry.

The difference between the people who eventually succeed and those who settle is that the former does not give up.

Take Elon Musk for example:

He got ousted as CEO of his own company, watched two of his companies hover on the brink of bankruptcy and got fired while on his honeymoon.

Failing once teaches you that the path to systematic success is rocky and filled with many obstacles.

Failure is inevitable. Failure is the part of the journey to your goal. It is natural.

It can only be damaging if you lose the belief in yourself. As long as you treat failing as a learning stone, failure will give you the self-confidence to try new things.

3. Failure Teaches

People fail for a number of reasons; some people fail because they are lazy; some people fail because they had too high expectations; Some people fail because their method is wrong.

Why did you fail?

Failure forces you to learn from your mistakes. It is a learning experience like no other.

Writing is my hobby. I sucked at it in the beginning.

I started out in Quora. My answers were usually getting 100 views at most. Shortly, I started to read the answers of better writers. I was comparing my posts with theirs —identifying the weakest and strongest points of my writings.

The weakest ones were disorganization, terrible formatting and sentences. I have then started working on them by reading articles on how to format better answers.

In several months, I managed to get substantial readership. I now have 20K followers and 8M views in Quora.

This was just my example of how I used my failures of writing to improve my skills.

Of course, you would say “so does success!”

The truth is success without failure will never allow you to do trial-and-error. How do you know why you succeed?

And, without knowing how to succeed or handle failure, how will you face bigger challenges where the rate of success is significantly less?

There is also the question of whether you are shooting low if you succeed every time?

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts. — Winston Churchill

Thanks for reading. In case, we haven’t met before, I am Ara Mambreyan :)

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