How to Turn Failure Into Success: 4 Lessons Learned
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” — Winston Churchill
Understand that everyone fails in life…everyone. Also understand that you will fail many times in life. I don’t say this because I have a negative outlook on life, but because it is a reality that we can’t ignore.
Failure itself isn’t the problem. There are countless learning opportunities waiting to be discovered within every failure. The problem is, many people feel defeated from failure. They let failures dig at their very being and make them feel like they will never achieve any real success.
I know this because I was one of those people.
Every missed opportunity, every failed relationship, every time a company passed on me during the interview process, I felt defeated.
We learn from failure, not from success — Bram Stoker
Today, I welcome failure with open arms. I’ve come to realize that it is a natural part of our existence as human beings. If you let it, failure will allow you to grow, mature, and achieve new perspectives on life in ways that success never could.
My only regret when it comes to failure is not recognizing it’s importance much earlier in my life.
Understanding, embracing, and learning from my failures has been invaluable to my growth. Every failure, every iteration of my life has shaped me into the person I am and will undoubtedly shape the person I become.
If you’re going through failures right now, or continue to find yourself repeating the same failures over and over, this article is for you. I know failing can hurt, and all you want to do is move on and hope for the best next time. I feel for you, but that attitude just won’t work. Believe me.
Throughout my journey, I have learned a few important lessons and strategies that have helped me to grow and find success through my failures. I want to share these lessons with you.
If you don’t take anything else away from this, remember: Within every failure there is a lesson to be learned. Every time a door closes, a new one opens. The moment you embrace failure and understand its importance to your personal growth is the moment you take a giant leap towards success.
Now, let’s get to it.
1. Adjust Your Definition of Failure
This is both the most important and most difficult hurdle to overcome. Before you can begin to learn from your failures, you must change what the definition of failure means to you.
If failure takes an emotional toll on you and makes you feel like everything you wanted to achieve is not possible and no longer in reach, then you need to redefine failure.
Ask yourself why failure hurts. Do you actually care about failing itself? Or are you more worried about what others will think? Your parents, your friends, your partner, your coworkers?
It’s easy to let failure drown you when you start giving weight to the opinions of the people around you. But, as we have already discussed, everyone fails. Just because you failed today doesn’t make you any less successful than the person who will fail tomorrow.
Start to treat failure as an opportunity to look inward and adjust. Look at it as a chance to reshape what’s important to you and what you value. Train your mind to see the lessons and the positives that come from failure and then use them to propel yourself towards the things you want in life.
It will be difficult to adjust your definition at first. Overcoming the emotions that accompany failure is no easy task. However, I promise that when you begin to see failure as a prerequisite to success, the light at the end of the tunnel will start to get a little brighter.
2. Don’t Just Assume Things Will Be Better Next Time
This is an important step towards learning from your failures and something that plagued me for so long.
Now, don’t get me wrong, it is great to be positive and optimistic. However, when it comes to failure, it’s going to take a little more action on your part for things to truly be better next time.
When we fail, we feel bad about the outcome. When we feel bad about the outcome, it can be a natural reaction to push it aside and think that the stars will eventually align and we will get the result we are hoping for.
Sorry, but no.
Say you just had another failed relationship. Weeks and weeks of fighting finally boiled over and your significant other decided to end things. You decide that their lack of effort in the relationship was the reason things got to this point. You carry on, believing that you will eventually find the right fit and that things will be better with the next person.
If you’re lucky, this may be true. But odds are, until you decide to find the reasons your relationships keep blowing up, you will continue to face failure time and again.
The world isn’t going to fix your failures, only you can do that. To do that, you need to understand what went wrong and adjust.
You need to break down exactly what went wrong.
3. Break Down Exactly What Went Wrong
To learn from any failure, you need to find the ‘why’. That reason things went south.
The process of searching for the ‘why’ can be an incredibly difficult one, especially when emotions are involved.
Let’s stick with the failed relationship example for consistency. When it’s all said and done, you may be unable to find the ‘why’. You may not even want to because you’re so overcome with emotion. It’s ok to let some time go by before you search for the ‘why’, but never forget to search! Once the air has cleared, you need to go back and evaluate what happened.
Try creating a timeline of the events that may have led to the end result and ask yourself what lessons can be learned.
- Was I being unreasonable in these situations?
- Could I have done something differently?
- Was I paying attention to the right problems?
It doesn’t matter what questions you ask. The important thing is to look back and see what you can learn from each failure.
Find the ‘why’ in every failure and use that information to adjust for next time. If you come to the conclusion that the ‘why’ was truly somebody else’s fault or the result of an external factor out of your control (rarely the case), then take responsibility for how you respond to that situation, and make that your ‘why’.
4. Take Responsibility For Your Failures
Whether you come to the conclusion that you could have done something differently in a failed situation, or that it was someone else's fault, you need to take responsibility for how you respond to that situation.
I speak from experience when I say the easy thing to do is blame a failed situation on someone else or something else. This is the biggest mistake you can make.
The problem with this approach is that you are constantly in victim mode which makes it very hard to ever take control of and learn from your failures.
“Your heart, your life, your happiness is your responsibility and your responsibility alone” — Will Smith
When you start taking responsibility for failed situations, regardless of the reason, you start to gain power over your life and your decisions moving forward.
If you adopt this mindset towards failure, I promise that it becomes easier and eventually you welcome failure because you understand that it will allow you to grow and get one step closer to achieving your goals, whatever they may be.
The Only Person In Your Way is You!
Life will be full of ups and downs. Sometimes, the downs will hurt… a lot.
Don’t let this deter you from the things you want to achieve in life. Everything you want to be, everything you want to accomplish, you already hold within you. All you need to do is get out of your own way and understand this to be true.
Failure will come and go — that’s life. How you respond to these failures and how you choose to treat them will determine your long-term success.
There are two options here:
Will you let your failures weigh you down?
Or will you own them, learn from them, and keep pushing tirelessly towards your goals?
The decision is yours.
