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We have all heard it said that two things in life are certain: death and taxes. While that is true, there is also another certainty: failure. It is the nature of everything. In fact, without failure we never succeed.
Think of the things that you do well. You probably walk okay, for example. And when you eat, you probably get most of your food in your mouth. But that was not always so, was it? If we had the video of your life, we would see you as a toddler going through walking and eating processes that look very little like your current level of performance. You would have fallen flat on your face in a lot of your steps. A lot of your pasta would also have ended up on your cheeks and chin. Basically, you have gone through the process of “learning.”
The process went like this: you tried, and you didn’t get it right. You walked three or four steps, then sat down hard on your padded area. You had a bad outcome. Your parents told you, “No problem. Try again.” You tried again and got a little closer to the goal before you hit the carpet. Your parents helped you up and you walked ten feet this time—all the way to the couch. Your parents cheered. You made similar progress on the eating front. After many noodles falling to the table, the floor, and down your shirt, you finally got most of the pasta inside your mouth and managed to keep it there. Your parents clapped and said, “Way to go!” Before long those awkward tasks became second nature. You walked and ate without conscious effort and no one made a big deal of it.
The point is that whatever is now second nature to you was at one time a very, very, daunting task, and you failed the first times that you tried it.
‘Try Again’
Failing at those tasks did not mean anything to you other than “try again.” Failure brought no personal interpretation as to your lovability or capability or feelings about yourself or the world at large. Failure meant simply that the task was yet to be learned. Everything you now do as second nature has gone through that process. You did not do it well the first time, and yet you did it again and again until you figured it out. That is the nature of life. We try, we don’t get it right, and we try again until we do. Then when the task is learned, we forget about the process of it and just do it, enjoying the result of the ability we have finally mastered.
The same thing goes for people who are successful at public speaking, making sales calls, playing championship golf matches, starting new businesses, interviewing for a new job, or whatever. They have gone through the failing part and now know how to do their job. But they did not skip the failure part. Their stumbles and falls are certainly on the video. But more often than not, the ones who are not doing well are stuck because they have not moved successfully through the failure cycle. They got hung up there.
The difference between the winners and those who are not winning is not that the winners do not fail.
They both fail, but the winners see it as normal, move through it well, and get past it. The others get stuck, not because they are incapable of doing whatever it is they are attempting, but because they are incapable of handling failure. Success brings its own set of problems.
Lesson number one about failure is this: whatever you wish to do, you will fail at it in the beginning. Accept that reality. That is the nature of the world. Everything works that way. Of course, you can always point to exceptions, like the lottery winner. But those are the exceptions that prove the rule. Ninety-nine out of a hundred winners will tell you that failure was the way to success.
Growth or Stagnation
“With everything that has happened to you, you can either feel sorry for yourself or treat what has happened as a gift. Everything is either an opportunity to grow or an obstacle to keep you from growing. You get to choose.” ~ Wayne Dyer
We often see people who remain in a stable job for ten, twenty, or thirty years. They may call their job a career, but it isn’t really. Instead of experiencing newness and growth in each of those years, they relive the same year ten, twenty, or thirty times. In their thirtieth year, they are no different from the way they were in their first year. They are not trying anything new, and they are not growing. It is the same old. Often they remain in stagnation and never step out of the rut because of a fear of failure. As a result, they never become the best at anything, or what is worse, they never achieve their own “personal best.” They refuse to fail, and only those who fail become the best.
Those who will not risk failure are very different from the others in stable jobs who have grown each year and learned along the way. Their thirty years on the job are all different years, not the same year repeated over and over.
A Dream Political Career
What would you do if your goal was a political career and the following things happened to you? The love of your life dies; you have a nervous breakdown; you fail as a businessman; you are defeated when you run for state legislator; you lose a job; you are defeated when you run for speaker of the state house; you are defeated for nomination to the political party; you lose a re-nomination; you are rejected to become a land officer; you are defeated for the U.S. Senate; you are defeated for the nomination of vice president; you are again defeated for the Senate.
How would you feel? Would you withdraw from the race? Would you think you are a loser? And would you think you are nuts to believe you could ever accomplish anything in politics? Would you give up? Or, would you become president of the United States and one of the most respected leaders of all time, negotiating one of our country’s most difficult periods of history and literally saving the country as we know it today? If you could handle failure, you would do exactly that. You would be Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln knew the truth of the Bible, which says, “For though a righteous man falls seven times, he rises again, but the wicked are brought down by calamity” (Proverbs 24:16 NIV ). With faith and the understanding that failure is not the end but common to all good people, you, too, can get up and rise to the heights that God desires for you. Who knows, you might even become president! (Excerpt is inspired from “It’s Not My Fault” by Henry Cloud & John Townsend.)
