Failure. What a heavy word. Most of us avoid it at all costs. Our minds are wired to draw on past experiences when making choices on whether or not to do something. When people experience something negative, like failure, they tend not to recreate that experience again - ultimately limiting their possibility.
What’s worse is that most work, school, and social environments reward success. How often do we see failure rewarded? Success lives in the land of failure and if we don’t reward the process of achieving success (where failure is a possible outcome) we are doing ourselves a disservice.
What we seem to miss is that everything we enjoy today, everything from engineering to technology to medicine, comes to us as a result of many failures, iterations, and improvements. As an example, many people don’t even buy the newest gadgets until the “bugs” or failures have been worked out.
Without failure we greatly reduce our advancement as humanity. Despite this truth, we generally want nothing to do with failure when it comes to living our lives, pursuing our passions, or standing up for what we believe in.
My advice: Flip failure around and see it as proof that you are working toward success. After all, the biggest failure you can have is not trying at all.
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