Believe it or not, failure is often a good thing. Doing so tends to teach you much more than when you succeed. It allows you to reevaluate and find ways to be better. When we succeed, it can be harder to motivate yourself to improve — since we’ve gotten the outcome we wanted, anyways. Consequently, all of the cliché conversations and quotes about failure are reasonably justified.
That being said, failure should not be glamorized the way that it is.
Failing sucks.
People that fail have negative consequences. If you fail in a relationship or with a friend, then you could lose someone that you love. If you fail in your business, then you wasted your time, other’s time, and someone’s, or multiple people’s, money. Failing in school or on an application is time you spent without a tangible benefit.
Yes, there are positives.
This is not to say that failing is all bad. As mentioned above, failing provides a great opportunity for learning. It gives you a chance to look in the mirror and reevaluate yourself.
In theory, we should be doing this frequently, regardless of external circumstances. Failure does not have to be the catalyst, and we should understand where we need to grow without someone or something else telling us we are not good enough. That said, developing this mindset is challenging. And, there are times when it can be impossible to know how we are doing until we succeed or fail. If I am running a company, then the number of users I have is a necessary indicator of how we are doing, for example.
The issue is in the glamorizing.
The problem is in glamorizing failure. Too many people flaunt their failures and are proud of the ways in which they have come up short. This is just wasted energy and misaligned ego validation.
Instead, you should learn from the ways that rich people handle failure. Anybody that is highly successful has, undoubtedly, failed. The difference is in how they handle that failure.
The best people seem to fail quietly.
The best people get right back up when they fail, and they learn from their mistakes. They do not feel the need for excessive LinkedIn posts or sharing with everyone around them what happened. Instead, they evaluate what happened and decide how they can change. Then, they spend time becoming better.
This is a large reason why we look at famous people and think they got there through luck or raw talent. They do not flaunt their failures on their way to the top. Successful people are not ashamed of their failures, but they just continue moving forward. Then, when they reach the apex, we feel like it came out of nowhere. It is infinitely more likely, though, that they struggled along the way.
They do not live in their past failures.
This also allows them to move beyond past incidents. Those who glamorize their failures often struggle to rise above them. They are continuously thinking about how they fell short, and they use that as a crutch for future projects. That is the opposite of what is intended. Living in past failures is detrimental. It takes attention away from the present and creates a propensity against risk-taking.
Instead, they focus their energy on what counts.
Those that flaunt their shortcomings are focusing on the wrong things. Instead, your attention should be on improvement.
If there is energy being spent thinking about past failures, rationalizing them to others and talking about them, then that is less effort being put towards the present moment. There are infinite ways in which we can be improving and learning each day. Successful people are committing their efforts to that. They constantly improve and refuse to dwell on their past mistakes. They use the lessons and motivation from failure to propel future growth.
Successful people do not fail for the sake of failing.
As mentioned above, failure is not a good thing. There are many negative consequences when you come up short. That means you should do everything in your power to succeed. This is in each endeavor that you take on.
Rich people do not fail for the sake of failing. They do not take it easy or put themselves in situations where they cannot succeed because they think that failure is good. Failure is most beneficial when you are not expecting it. It is in those times that it can serve as a wake-up call or create realizations for you.
When you are intending to fail, you are not learning anything from the situation at hand. Rich people, instead, have spent their lives trying to succeed. They take on tasks that they are confident in handling, and they give them their all.
Failure is just a byproduct of hard work.
It is important to understand that it is okay to fail. Those that bounce back well and continue to improve tend to be most successful. No rich person actively seeks out failure, though. To the contrary, they avoid failure as much as possible. It is just that they are not afraid to fail and they are able to learn from past mistakes for a more productive future.
