10 Lessons To Learn From Failure

Sep 04, 2018

Are you a failure? Have you ever failed in life? Congratulations! The lessons that you learn now can help you in the future. The road to success is paved with many failures; historically, even many famous people have failed at times in their life. People like Albert Einstein, Steven Spielberg, and Abraham Lincoln have each faced multiple failures. America’s 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, had eight failed political office runs before becoming president.

Even though no one wants to fail, you might come to appreciate the lessons that failure can teach you. 

According to the Merriam Webster Dictionary, "Character" is defined as “moral excellence and firmness.” This excellence is because you didn't give up. The stick-to-it attitude results in building your character into a better person; failure actually becomes your strength if you choose to let it build your character. 

Think of the last time that you failed at something. Through the failure, you have the opportunity to find something that suits you more positively. Sometimes in life, you don’t know what you want or like, but failure lets you see what you don’t want - and that is very helpful to find new opportunities that you do like. 

Whether you failed a test or missed a deadline at work, there are important life lessons to be learned from failure. It can be a good teacher if you allow the lessons to work positively in your life. You can enable these experiences to teach you to do better in the future and how to prepare yourself appropriately.

If you think failing is hard, try getting back up and fighting again! It is not easy at all! Everybody is scared of failure, but deciding not to quit requires courage. People around you are depending on you, and the courage that is born from failure can push to greater heights in your life.

If you successfully accomplished every single task in life without failure, you would never know the benefits of perseverance. But as you know, failure will happen, and then what are you going to do? Just quit? Perseverance says no; it means that you’re going to get back up and keep fighting through the rejections and the disastrous attempts.

As the old saying goes, “Try, try, and try again.”

If your goal is not met, then you have to keep working at it a different way. This is the ability to attempt a task uniquely with your goal in mind. Necessity is the mother of invention, so if what you are working on is important to you, keep finding new ways to make it happen.

It has been said that if you know your “why” then, you can keep going. Winston Churchill once said, “Success is your ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” The motivating power of success should not be overlooked.

While you may never want to fail, the more you can accept the fact that you will fail will help you in the future. It’s not a gloomy attitude that you are a terrible failure, but a reality check that keeps you grounded. This grounding is paramount if you mentally want to overcome small and large failures in life; so now you can accept the struggle and keep going.

Steve Jobs is quoted as saying, “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

Where are you going today? You could be stuck behind an office desk or huddled under your covers from the failures that you have faced, or you can use these failures as a way to push through them and explore your dreams.

What will keep you going from one failure to another? It is the hidden gem of resilience; this is how you take the uncertainty of the future, with the discomfort of present shortcomings, and push through them. Life is a hard teacher, but failure will teach you to never quit and be resilient through the hard times. 

So how about it? Are you ready to call yourself a failure and quit? Or are you prepared to accept failure, move past the struggles, and keep going to your goal? You can be a better person the more you allow failure to teach you important lessons. What has failure taught you? What would you want your friends to know? You can take your failures and help someone else today.