So What, You Failed! We’ve All Been There on Our Way to Success

Eighty percent of all businesses fail. That is 8 out of 10 people’s dreams. It can be hard to imagine that the businesses and dreams that succeed represent only 20% of all attempts. There is a lesson in this statistic that they do not teach us in school: we will face many failures throughout our lives. That is a hard lesson to learn, but if learned successfully it will provide insight that will enable our success. My own failures – and I have had many – have brought me invaluable lessons, a strength and fortitude to rise to the next occasion, courage to embrace my dreams, and a fierce determination to reach my goals. Instead of running away from the challenges, I ran towards them having learned from the failures. That is one of the important lessons that failures bring us, the insight to know what we need to do next to become the person we wish to be. Our reactions to failure is what sets the stage for advancement or retreat along our personal path of success. This contrast helps us clarify our path. Failure can lead us towards our destiny if we embrace it positively. 

One of the biggest things that holds us back is how we define success and how we define failure. But if we knew that almost everyone, especially the most successful of us, had majorly failed and done so many times, we’d be less hard on ourselves. Take Oprah, for instance. She is arguably one of the most successful women in entertainment today. But the beginning of her career was not so auspicious. She was hired to co-anchor the evening news for a local ABC affiliate in Baltimore. She and her co-anchor did not get along and the public was not receptive of her as a young, African-American woman in a role that was predominantly held by older white men. She ended up being blamed, replaced, and demoted. But the experience allowed her to understand that news was not where she belonged. Instead, she found a more emotional approach that she aligned with in the daytime talk show format. This is where she excelled. The original failure set her on her path to success. If she had given up and left the industry altogether, the world would not have Oprah.    

Fear of failure is one of the main reasons why people do not pursue their dreams. From a young age we notice that we only celebrate success. We are also taught from an early age to associate failure with shame and guilt. By associating these negative emotions with failure, we learn to place ourselves in our own jail cells, hemmed in by the self-imposed limitations that hold us back. The easiest way to break out of that mind prison is to reevaluate how we think of failure in relation to our life. It is not an easy task, but it is a necessary one especially if we are feeling weighed down by fear or we feel like we’re unsuccessful.

Here are a few tips that can help you get started on rethinking failure that may set you on your personal path to success:

• Judge Not: It is not your place to qualify your life as a success or a failure. We all live our lives in a state of flux. We can be living the dream and still have to deal with stress and failure. No one’s life is 100% perfect. Every one of us deals with an uncountable number of successes and failures throughout our lives. It is the way we choose to react to our failures and our successes that shapes our character.
• Face Your Fear: Evaluate the dreams you may have put on hold because you were afraid that if you failed them, it would crush you. Look for the excuses you’ve used to justify avoiding going after what you are passionate about. If you’re procrastinating or feeling anxious about a goal or a task, recognize that it is fear that is fueling it. Then turn towards your fear and face it by accepting that failure is just another step on the way to success.
• Redefine Failure: We associate very strong negative emotions with failure. Embarrassment, guilt, and shame make us all want to hide our failures. One way to turn failure on its head is to accept that each and every one of us fails. Sometimes the failures are big and sometimes they are small. Instead of getting weighed down by shame or fear, we can embrace our failure and rebound from it to reach our goals.
• Celebrate Your Wins: Remember that we have numerous wins every day that we do not celebrate, but we should. I recommend you create a habit of journaling your wins every day. These wins will be personal, but you can start with wins as simple as waking up in the morning, feeling good, going to a job you love, and accomplishing the daily tasks you set for yourself. Do not overlook how important these wins are! 

If you feel like a failure, take stock in knowing that we’ve all been there. Not one person who has walked the Earth can claim otherwise. Even the most significant figures in history have failed, some failing epically. Those who have made names for themselves despite their failures have looked at the failure as a lesson and moved forward. Failures are just stepping stones along the journey of our lives. They lead us towards the successes we desire and teach us who we truly are.