So, you failed.
So, you failed.
No one ever got good at anything without f**king up.
You’ve all heard the stories of famous writers rejected so often they created sculptures of the letters. Even Stephen King uttered this popular quote:
“By the time I was fourteen, the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and kept on writing.”
Not only writers faced incessant ‘failure.’
In 1915 Einstien thought gravitational waves resulted from his theory of relativity. Years later he claimed the opposite and retracted his statement. For a while, he goes back and forth on this theory.
Several years later he publishes a paper stating that they do not exist. In between the publication process, he doctored the paper again claiming that they, in fact, do exist. A friend of Einstein warned him.
“Einstein you have to be careful. Your famous name is on these papers.”
Einstein laughs and replies “My name is on plenty of wrong papers.”
In 2015 it was finally proven that they exist.
Everyone from Michael Jordan to Oprah to Van Gogh. There is an endless list of inspirational, successful and iconic people that often faced a lifetime worth of closed doors before one opened.
Story after story, we are reminded that success at any scale requires failure and most importantly, learning from it.
Failing is Necessary.
1. If you’re any good at something, you’ll have to drill it into everybody’s heads over and over again. Long after people request your autograph and long after you retire to your tropical home.
“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats” — Howard Aiken.
2. We need failure to form a solid foundation upon which we can build our successes. In fact, failure to fail is what causes crippling failure, the kind that prevents action in the first place.
We discourage failure, and by doing so, we discourage success — Janna Levin.
3. The only real failure is the chance you never took. Failure to try and failure by trying yield vastly different outcomes.
It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all — in which case you fail by default — J.K. Rowling.
4. In any event, starting something is always 99% upside. From a beginners view, anything besides utter failure is a success; there is no reputation or expectations. Not that those are important anyway.
Why is failure so special anyway?
Why does all the stigma cloud over failure in trying rather than never taking action in the first place? We should fear rejection of ourselves and not the rejections of others.
We judge others in failure or success according to our expectations of them. Expectations are like being hugged tightly; the intention is often pure, yet we are held back.
Why do we recover so quickly if we fail in a game compared to failure in other aspects of our lives? Just as the game isn’t real, our perception of failure is equally fabricated.
The consequences of failure may be real, but our perception of them is not. Similarly as fear may be caused by a very real source, but the reaction itself is not real.
The same way we compensate for weakness in a particular area with strength in another, we compensate for failure by refusing to quit.
The sting of failure is never a permanent scar; what we lose in confidence we gain in experience.
When we fail, we have two choices. Just like when we feel any negative emotion. Either we move on, or we chose to linger.
Let’s start seeing failure as an opportunity rather than the end of one. Why? — Because 99% of notable achievements are born from the opportunity of failure.
Failure is the chance to get better, to reassess, to build discipline and to succeed.
