I’ve dealt with a lot of failure in my career. It is not fun and somedays, it makes you feel like quitting. Remember this: you are not alone! Almost every single successful person on the planet has had some kind of failure in their life. It’s part of the process!
I’ve learned a lot from failure and there are 5 key things that I would want everybody experiencing failure to know. These are the 5 things that failure teaches you.
1. Failure teaches you how to pivot and be flexible. You may think something will work really well and you’ll be excited to try it out only to find out that nobody else is as excited about it as you are and it flops miserably. I still have this happen to me from time to time!
You will learn how to quickly try something else instead and not get stuck doing the same bad idea over and over again. Pivoting is vital to growth because it means you are constantly taking what you have discovered and are putting new things into practice.
2. Failure teaches you how to learn from others. Sometimes it is hard to ask for advice or even to take advice when someone says what you’re doing is just not very good. It’s a tough pill to swallow! If you can ask someone to give you advice and learn from them it will help you out in the long run.
There are people out there with way more experience who just know what works and what doesn’t. Save yourself some time and learn from these people! Get a mentor, find someone you trust who can give you criticism. Whatever you do, be open to hearing their advice.
3. Failure teaches you to appreciate the success of others. So often we get stuck in a jealousy cycle where we look at the success of someone else and we think “why couldn’t that be me? Why do they deserve success?” Instead of sitting with these negative thoughts, next time you see someone with more success than you, praise them!
So often people look at those at the top and think they had it easy or that they got lucky. I can guarantee you that most people did not. They probably put a ton of work in and hustled harder than anyone else to get to where they are today. A positive mindset and an ability to lift others up instead of bringing them down is the best mindset to achieve success.
4. Failure teaches you to be creative. If you’re not giving up after a failure, then you will have to try again with something different. You’ll become more creative because you’ll start to think differently as you learn more about what works for your audience and what doesn’t.
Take that creativity and come up with new ideas to try until you find the ones that work for you.
5. Failure teaches you how to be persistent. If you’ve failed in the past, and you’re still here today, you’re one of the few people who kept trying. You don’t give up when things get tough and you don’t let others run you down. Be persistent in your work and keep learning and trying until you succeed.
There are lessons we can learn from every situation and when you put them into practice, you’ll be a better leader because of it! People will start to realize that you’re different from the rest because you kept going and they will be inspired by that.
Take these learning opportunities and turn them into growth for yourself and for the people following you. When they encounter failure down the road they will remember the good that can come from it too. The cycle will continue and more people will be consistently following their dreams rather than giving up on them!
Connect the Dots
Go out there and look at the failures you’ve had in the past and identify what you have learned from each experience. Did you learn anything?
Try and identify if there is something you have learned from an experience of failure. Do you identify with any of the categories above? When we can appreciate the lessons that failure can teach us it makes the fall a bit softer and easier to get back up again.