Failure and rejection are not bad. If no one ever failed, society would be boring with mediocre products and no sticky notes. That’s why I am glad we all, at one point in our lives, sucked. This applies to job hunting, college/university selection, entrepreneurship and life in general.
Assuming we learn from our mistakes, one more failure is one less weakness.
First, The Bad
The first time I ever failed a test I crumpled it up, threw it in the trash and cried. Seriously. I thought I was too smart and hated failure too much to accept it. Long story short, I failed at failing.
Failing is not fun because we feel really bad about ourselves afterward. Regret and remorse just eat away at us, and everything we should have done hits us like a ton of bricks. Getting stuck in this rut kills motivation and self-esteem.
When we don’t fail, our quality of work deteriorates because we do not push ourselves.
The Good
The obvious benefit of failing is that it requires us to get better. To me, failure is motivation to improve and that’s why I love feedback. Assuming we learn from our mistakes, one more failure is one less weakness, which is one more strength.
I believe failure is second only to real life experience in the list of things that help us to learn and grow. Life experience helps us learn from and therefore avoid unnecessary failure, and failure help us avoid undeserved success. That is vital because undeserved success gives us a false sense of entitlement, which is what happened to me.
The Art
The art of failure is patience. You need patience to understand that not everything comes right now or even the way you expect it to come. When you fail, you grow in patience and appreciation of learning – it makes you better.
When someone tells you your idea is no good or you’re not what they’re looking for in a job applicant, it’s a stepping-stone to something better. Pessimism does nothing but hinder progress and a lot of great people understand this.
That is why I will end this post with some great quotes about failure:
“Making your mark on the world is hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it. But it’s not. It takes patience, it takes commitment, and it comes with plenty of failure along the way. The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won’t. It’s whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.” —Barack Obama
“I’ve missed more than 9000 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. And that is why I succeed.” —Michael Jordan
“I never failed once. Discovering how to make a light bulb just happened to be a 2000 step process.” —Thomas A. Edison
Great Quotes at the end DP. Michael Jordan, Barack Obama, and Thomas Edison are all people who have obviously achieved the highest levels of success in their respective fields. Their quotes provide inspiration to young minds on a daily basis. It was a quote by you however that I will take away from this article and try to implement in my daily mindset.
“To me, failure is motivation to improve and that’s why I love feedback. Assuming we learn from our mistakes, one more failure is one less weakness-”David-Paul Williams
Great Insight.
Hi Nolan,
I agree with you – David’s quote is the winner here.
I always talk about this one great business book I read a few months ago (given to me by TalentEgg’s graphic designer, Marc!) called “It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be”. In the book, the author writes that you should never ask your friends/colleagues simply what they think about something you have produced, but rather ask “What’s wrong with it?” – that way, the author argues, you can identify your weaknesses and improve.
It’s the same idea as what David’s saying – try, fail, iterate based on what you learned, try again.
Like you, David, I fail at failing. More accurately, I fail to realize at that moment that failing isn’t the end of the world, it’s just another path.
I had a similar experience to your failed test when I got my first “C” in high school. At the time, I thought my life was over, but realistically it probably didn’t make a difference in outcome of my life today and I’ve definitely gone through a lot worse since and come out OK.
To be completely cheesy, a failure isn’t a failure unless you learn nothing from and do the exact same thing next time.