Let’s Celebrate Failure, Not Just Success
“If you’ve never failed, you’ve never lived” is how the saying goes.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we should celebrate failure, not just success. We should celebrate failures every bit as much as we love to laud success. Sadly, failure is less accepted for those who choose to work for someone else.
Employers who want to hire candidates with real grit, experience, and determination should most certainly value candidates who have made mistakes in the past.
Why? Never failing is a sure sign of low ambition. Because exposing yourself to the possibility of failure shows courage and a willingness to pursue difficult goals. Because failure is a source of deep learning and personal growth.
Failure is probably one of the aspects in life most people are afraid of. But the truth is: everyone has failed and everyone will fail again. We sometimes forget that all successful people have failed, but they did not stop after their failures. They stood up and tried again, time after time. We tend to think that people who are successful were just lucky, it just fell into their laps or they just had the right connections.
Some of the biggest and most successful companies in the world have made a point of celebrating failures that have come about through appropriate risk-taking and innovation, as well as their successes.
Tata famously has a ‘Dare to Try’ award which is awarded to those failures that came through innovation and gave the company some valuable lessons. Proctor and Gamble have a ‘Heroic Failure’ award that honors employees or teams who gained the most insight from a failure.
What is common among these initiatives is that they encourage innovation and risk-taking and accept that failures can offer very valuable lessons that then help the organization go on to succeed.
Of course, if a company is constantly failing and does not turn those failures into success, it’s not going to last all that long, but a company that is afraid of failure and does not learn from it is rarely going to be a success.
When people are successful, we always focus on their success, not on the years of struggle, failure and trying again and again. We only see the bright side and don’t want to or forget about the years of hard work, while those years mostly bring the most inspiring and motivational stories.
So do not be afraid of failure, it is a part of your road to success. I give you 4 reasons why you should embrace failure and see it as a valuable part of your journey, after all without failure, how sweet would success be?
#1 — Failure is life’s greatest teacher
“The quickest road to success is to possess an attitude toward failure of ‘no fear’” — Ralph Heath, author of Celebrating Failure: The Power of Taking Risks, Making Mistakes and Thinking Big.
In order to grow, you need failure, it is life’s ultimate lesson. Failing will happen, no matter how hard you try to avoid it, so you might as well have a ‘no fear’ attitude towards it. This does not mean you should expect to fail, but when it happens accept it.
There is value in failure. Through failure you will get to know yourself better and you will learn from your mistakes. Failures make us rethink, reconsider and find new ways and strategies to achieve our goals.
#2 — Failure will make you reach your potential
“One of the biggest secrets to success is operating inside your strength zone but outside of your comfort zone,” — Ralph Heath
In order to reach your ultimate potential, your personal best and to make the ‘impossible’ possible, you need to push yourself, go to the absolute limits and definitely not fear failure. When you have a no fear attitude and embrace failure it will maximize your motivation, determination and perseverance.
#3 — Failure brings character and humbles you
No one wants to fail, because it is bad for our ego. Failure humbles you and will make you evaluate the situation better. When your ego is in charge, you will not learn from the mistakes you have made, you will not be open to other people’s views or see the situations clearly.
We need the learn, evaluate and listen to other people if we want to see what needs to change in order to succeed.
Your ego always wants to be right and will get in the way of you and your success. In order to be successful we have to accept that we were wrong, evaluate, learn and move on.
#4 — Failure determines the kind of person you are
There are two types of people in this world, people who take failure personally, see it as a permanent situation and give up, and there are people who use it as a lesson, do not take it personally but see it as a temporary setback.
We all feel an emotional low after we have failed, that is natural, human and inevitable. But how we respond to our failures is what determines our road to success. If you feel an emotional low after you have failed, read or listen to stories of people like Oprah Winfrey or J.K. Rowling and their journey to where they are now, this will help you get through your emotional low, get motivation and move on.
“If I become complacent and don’t take risks, someone will notice what I am doing and improve upon my efforts over time, and put me out of work. You’ve got to keep finding better ways to run your life, or someone will take what you’ve accomplished, improve upon it, and be very pleased with the results. Keep moving forward or die.” — Ralph Heath
The Difficult Candidate is an Easy Choice
As a manager, if I were given a choice between two candidates, one of whom went to a top-rated college, has the experience and is entitled; and another who has struggled through a series of jobs but is less entitled and is ready for the next fight, I will choose the latter every single time. I know that he or she or will handle failures better, or find a solution from their previous experiences.
The first candidate gives me little confidence that they are ever likely to leave their comfort zone and I know from bitter experience that they will probably run or hide at the first sign of real difficulty or challenge. That’s when I need my team to be their best. There will inevitably come a time when I will need people to step up and come through for me, and at that point, they will earn their entire salary in a few hours or days. The rest of the time I could probably have hired any one of many candidates.
Motivational speaker and success coach Brenden Dilly says,” the average person is terrified by failure — and this marks them out from true winners.”
“Winners don’t fear failure; their relationship with this inevitability is met with a matter-of-fact attitude that leaves those around them scratching their heads,”
Dilly says failing should be a daily goal. Yes, daily.
He says:
“If you’re failing in one regard or another every single day it means you’re learning, growing and challenging yourself with regularity. The size of your failures will be in direct proportion to the size of your ambition.”
Obviously, just how often we fail depends on how we define failure, and how big a mistake has to be to count. The more important point is that we need to embrace failure, not fear it. We might not be ready to hold a party after our latest disaster, but we should certainly be looking to maximize the learning opportunity. Employers who want candidates that will bring real value when a business needs it most should be hoping to see an indication of that attitude on a CV/resume
The benefits of failing and the lessons learned from mistakes are increasingly seen as an integral part of necessary risk-taking in business and vital to an organization’s competitiveness and long-term success.
You live life every day but die only once, so for what you do on a daily basis celebrate your successes and learn from your failures and continue living.
Credit: indeed motivation. the business world, thrive global, top resume
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