Success is Overrated. Why Failure is Important.

What is it about failure that brings different reactions from people? Just look at the way two types of people talk about how they failed. You can figure out who is going to make it big eventually and who will continue to toil for a long time. The first one will go something like – “Oh, what fun it was to work on that business!! Yes, we had to close the business eventually, but the thrill and experience we got from it we will never forget.” Now, compare this to what the second type of people are saying – “Boy, I would never go through that type of experience again. Not only did I lose everything I had, but, most importantly, I have lost desire to try something new again. Wish I had not got into it in the first place.” Guess who is going to be the successful business person?
Why is it important to fail?

It’s simple. If you haven’t failed, you haven’t tried hard enough. And if you haven’t tried hard enough, you have lost the battle even before it has begun! Winston Churchill famously said – “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” Therein lies the secret sauce of success. It is immaterial that you have failed at something, what is important is what you have done after that.
Thomas Edison, the greatest inventor ever, held 1,000 patents in many diverse areas. He was responsible for changing the lives of humanity in many different ways. But did you know that it took him 10,000 trials before he was successful at making the light bulb. Just imagine what would have happened if he had given up after 9,999 tries! How many of us have the patience to persevere for so long?
Why are so many people afraid of failure? Many people equate their failure to incompetence. This is a wrong analogy. If that was the case, Edison would not have thousands of patents in his name after failing so many times. The correct analogy for failure is risk taking. The reason you are failing is because you are willing to take risk. The person who is standing on the shore of a raging river will never experience the thrill of that ride, and more importantly he will never get to the other side of the river. You only have hope for success if you are willing to fail (read take risk) and learn from it.
Going back to our opening paragraph, are some people wired to not take risk and fail? Can you teach someone to be more risk taker than he normally is? I think the answer is yes as long as you can show him clear path and provide guidelines for risk taking. There are ways by which you can take risk, fail multiple times, and be successful eventually without losing everything. We will show how you can approach this and learn to fail (succeed) in the next post.
Till then tell us about your failures and what you learned from it in comments below.