However, every successful person has dealt with failure throughout their journey. The big difference is they didn’t treat failure as a stopping stone that exploded their dreams, rather they learned from it, making it a stepping stone to their success. Research shows that around 60% of us don’t chase our dreams due to our fear of failing.
People typically are either successful or unsuccessful failures. A successful failure maintains their focus and vision, learning and adapting from their failures enabling them to keep moving forward. However, unsuccessful failures often lose their commitment to their vision leading them to give up on their dreams.
Here are 6 things you can do to become a successful failure.
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Stop believing in fairytales
Most of us know that Santa and the Easter Bunny are mythical characters. However there is one fairytale we stubbornly hang onto, where success can be achieved without failure. Our brains often make the fantastical leap from goal-setting to achieving success, with no element of failure built into the story.
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Establish a positive failure mindset
Every successful person has faced failure, often more times than we have but they just kept going. Michael Jordan said “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life.”
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Reinvent yourself as a successful failure
Get over yourself. This is advice I have heard all too often, and arguably some would say maybe not enough. I still take my failures as personal confirmation that I am not enough. There is a mental choice we get to make, are we a successful failure or a complete failure? Failure is an event, not who we are.
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Fail fast. Learn fast. Improve fast.
Failure is not fatal; it’s feedback. By embracing failures, we learn to pivot and innovate, much like the tech startups in Silicon Valley that thrive on the “fail fast, fail often” mantra. This concept of not only accepting failure, but planning for failure is part of every leading-edge technology, medical and scientific advancement ever made.
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Stay focused and unfocused
One of the biggest challenges for learner drivers is to be able to master dual vision when driving. They get so focused on what is right in front of them they end up swerving and adjusting unnecessarily. If however they looked further ahead, they have the close action in their field of vision, but wouldn’t lose sight of the big picture. Failing successfully requires staying focused and unfocused to help stay on track as well as reacting to the more immediate things coming at us.
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Embrace the journey
“This too shall pass” is a commonly quoted phrase. The thing I love about it is that it’s about context and the highs and lows of life. Things going really well for you? Enjoy the moment and sorry for being a downer but “this too shall pass”. Equally, having the crappiest luck ever, then take solace in that “this too shall pass”. Trying to achieve a goal or anything worthwhile will very rarely be via a direct path. There will be ups and down, twists and turns and to expect anything differently would be unrealistic. Embracing the journey is key to maintaining the mindset to keep moving forward and remain resilient.
By becoming a successful failure, we become open to learning from our mistakes enabling us to recover and continue on our paths to success. Even the word mistake (mis-take) highlights that, unless your failure was fatal, you get the opportunity to try again. Hopefully, your next attempt becomes more refined and you do become the G.O.A.T. of your world.
Gary Waldon is the bestselling author of Mastering the Art of Reinvention ($32.95). He is a transformation specialist who works with people at all levels from CEOs, CIOs, business leaders and professional athletes through to teachers and anyone who needs to reinvent themselves when life changes. Find out more at www.garywaldon.com
