Failure can be success. “Show me a good loser, and I will show you a loser.” These immortal words have driven generations of people to fear the idea of failure. The result has been a culture of blame.
Are you crazy?
Am I crazy to suggest that failure is simply success in another guise? Well, let’s walk through that idea before you dismiss it. When things are going well there is no need to change. Using our feet for transportation was working very well for the first 100,000 years or so of our life on this planet. The first wheel for transportation did not appear until about 3200 BCE. The failure to envision the first wheel (which was a potters wheel created 300 years earlier) might be viewed as a failure of imagination. It might also be viewed as a huge success. Three hundred years of testing and improving the potters wheel was what it took to perfect the concept, then convert it’s horizontal aspect to a vertical aspect. Evolution is not a rapid event, and it is seldom a straight line.
Try, try again
Even though we have been taught since early childhood not to give up, to try, try again, the tendency to blame others for failure has lead us to forget this choice piece of wisdom. We sometimes get the idea that when a project or venture we have undertaken does not demonstrate results immediately, we have failed. Few things could be further from the truth, unless of course we stop trying. That we have tried in the first place sets us apart from those who have yet to venture into the unknown. That is our first success, trying. So even though your book or invention or concept has not yet found it’s highest application, that failure is in itself a success. The more times you “fail” and try again, the more times you have succeeded!
It’s all here in It’s All About Me, available at Amazon.com. Click on the cover below and then order your own copy.
