Fail to be Successful

Today I am going to write about failure and what it means in perspective of the road to success. Over the last 6 and half months I have written mainly on finding purpose and success in life. However, with all this we must not forget that true success doesn’t come easy and rarely comes first time or second time at trying.

So, what is failure? For me it’s a lesson, a signpost, a test or even a new door. So often we model our success on the success of others, but some of the best learning curves are the failures of others, understanding why things went wrong for them. Some of the most successful people in the world have the view that there is no such thing as failure, and for me this is true. True failure only comes when you give up completely.

Here are a few of my ways to overcome failure in your journey to success:

Firstly, take responsibility. It’s your failure, not other peoples and how you deal with it is down to you. It is like when we want to get over anything bad, we need admission first. Learn to say, ‘I was wrong’, ‘it was my mistake’ because by owning your mistakes and failures you learn to appreciate how fragile success can be.

Failure makes everyone feel bad, especially in the initial stage, but as you understand why things haven’t worked out that feeling will get better. It will most likely have pinched at your ego too, though dealing with this is part of the journey to success. Learning to curb the ego, will make it far easier to find the motivation to get up and have another go.

Look for the lesson. If you don’t succeed the first time, take time out to understand what went wrong, sometimes it’s not about what you are doing, sometimes it’s about you and your personality. Maybe it’s the way it was presented, or something you missed when putting the idea together.

Among the learning process it’s healthy to learn a new mindset for your new approach. As already stated, real failure is when you give up, so if you don’t give up then it is nothing more than a setback. They say that the comeback will be far greater than setback. So, you see, failure is temporary it’s what you do with it, that gives how long it lasts.

Go back to the beginning and remind yourself why you set out to what you are doing in the first place. Check in to see if your reasons are still valid, have they changed, has your core plan changed? Sometime failure happens because we go off course from the plan we set out with and this would be a good reason to fail, because you are not actually doing what you set out to achieve.

Don’t bottle it all up, talk to people about it. Listen to feedback and work on it daily. Rework your plan, don’t be afraid to change, to add or remove things. The more you do this the more you will discover why things didn’t work out right, and it will give you something better to work with the next time, this is known as gaining support from the world.

Don’t lose hope, use the world around you to inspire and motivate you. It might be you need to take a break from the project and take time out to be with nature. Sometimes when we are working on things constantly, we lose vision, miss things and that can lead to mistakes. Even in the height of our passion it’s healthy to distance ourselves occasionally.

Whatever you do don’t stop too long, try to learn quickly from mistakes and move forward. Try to focus on essentials rather then everything. The longer you remain still the harder it will be to move forward and get going again. If you are reassessing plans remember you can correct or change later, nothing has to be perfect for you begin again.

When you do all this at pace it will help to improve self-esteem and mental health, and each time you hit a setback moving forward becomes easier, you find solutions quicker and eventually you begin to see the brick wall coming so you proactively change course before you are forced to a grinding halt.

Remember failure is all part of become successful.