Everybody fails from time to time. Anyone that has never failed at something has probably never accomplished anything worthwhile. Nearly every mental or physical activity you have ever performed in your life, you failed at it the first time you tried it (except for those things performed automatically by your nervous system). But somehow, when we reach a certain age we become self-conscious and start to view failure as a bad thing.
Failure is not a bad thing, our reaction to the failure is what is important. If we allow embarrassment to overshadow our desire to achieve, then a few early failures will derail whatever you are attempting; whether it is algebra, skiing, or asking a girl to the prom. Nobody likes failing, falling or rejection. But you will live a happier more fulfilled life if you retake that quiz, go back up that slope, and ask another girl out. As long as we maintain the idea that a single failure is a normal part of life, we just view them the same way we view bumps in the road. When you hit a bump, you keep driving. You don’t get out of your car and yell at the bump in the road, and berate yourself for hitting the bump, then blame the bump on your future problems.
Winston Churchill said, “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” Understand this, the opposite of success is not failure, the opposite of success is quitting.
Quitting also becomes a habit. And when we develop a habit of quitting when things get hard, eventually we stop trying altogether. So we try fewer and fewer new things. We stay in familiar territory, we stay comfortable, we stop growing and we start stagnating. “A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure till he gives up.”
Try to fail at something this week.
