The Importance of Failure

Why Failure is so Important

Failure Lesson #1: Experience

The first important lesson gained from failure is experience.
What happens when we fail? When we go through something and can walk away with firsthand experience, it helps us to develop a deeper understanding for life.
The experience of failing at something is truly invaluable. It completely alters our frame-of-mind through the induction of pain. It makes us reflect on the real nature of things and their importance in our lives, transforming and improving our future-selves.

Lesson #2: Knowledge

Failure brings with it important firsthand knowledge. That knowledge can be harnessed in the future to overcome that very failure that inflicted so much pain in the first place. Nothing can replace the knowledge gained from failure.
When Thomas Edison famously failed nearly 10,000 times to create a commercially viable electric lightbulb, with each failure, he gained the knowledge of just one more avenue that didn’t work. It was the accumulated knowledge developed from nearly 10,000 failed attempts that ultimately led to his success.

Lesson #3: Resilience

Failing in life helps to build resilience. The more we fail, the more resilient we become.
In order to achieve great success, we must know resilience. Because, if we think that we’re going to succeed on the first try, or even the first few tries, then we’re sure to set ourselves up for a far more painful failure.
The characteristic of resilience can help us in so many ways in life. Resilience helps to breed success by setting the game up to win. Gone are the lofty expectations that thing will happen overnight, and in comes the expectations that true success will take an enormous amount of work and effort.

Lesson #4: Growth

When we fail, we grow and mature as human beings. We reach deeper meanings and understandings about our lives and why we’re doing the things that we’re doing. This helps us to reflect and take things into perspective, developing meaning from painful situations.
Life is designed for us to grow and improve. From the very genetic fibers that make us into who we are as individual persons, into the fabric of society on a global scale, growth is a fundamental part of us. Without growth, we couldn’t improve life on every front.

Lesson #5: Value

One of the biggest lessons that we can learn from life’s failures is the necessity to create and spread an exceedingly high amount of value. In fact, value lies at the heart of success and a lack of value is a fundamental pillar to failure.
In thinking about your past failures, think about how much value you brought to the table. Could you have offered more value? Would that have prevented failure? When you learn to create immense value, and do so consistently, you will eventually succeed.

How to Recover from Failure

There are many ways to recover from failure. Once you understand what failure is, and how it’s meant to serve us rather than hinder us, you’ll free your mind and open your heart to experience the joy of failure.
Joy? Yes – Joy.
When we’re going through failure, it’s hard to recognize the importance of it. We can’t see the forest through the trees, so to speak, when there’s a fire threatening to burn the whole village down. But, that’s just what we have to do.
So, if you’ve failed in life, hopefully you better understand the importance of failing and failing often. But, how do you recover from failure? There are a few ways to do this.

#1 – Ignore the Naysayers

When you fail, surely there will be the people telling you, “I told you so,” and, “You should have listened to me.”
Ignore those people. Ignore the naysayers.
Living a life that’s completely safe all the time, isn’t really living. If you watched J.K. Rowling’s Harvard commencement speech, then surely you walked away with a better understanding of this.

#2 – Understand that it’s Okay to Fail

One of the best ways to recover from failure is to understand that it’s quite alright to fail. If you were to conduct any one of a number of searches on the Web, you would find countless stories about failure from the world’s most successful people.
It’s okay to fail. But it’s not okay to give up. 
Even if you failed and that failure was extremely painful, it’s not okay to give up. Keep failing over and over again if you have to. Keep on doing it until you succeed. Success will taste so much sweeter when you reach it.
Pushing forward and not giving up is quite possibly one of the best ways to recover from failure. Remember, it’s not true failure unless you throw in that proverbial towel and wholeheartedly give up forever.

#3 – Realize that it’s Okay to Fail

Although failure to us symbolizes pain, and we’ll do more to avoid pain than we will to gain pleasure, we have to realize that it’s okay to fail. When we realize the importance that failure has played in the lives of the most successful people, it’s far easier to reach this understanding.
Failure will take you on a journey that you might not want to go on. But, the reality of the situation is that those journeys will help to mold and shape you into a better person.
Recovering from failure becomes far more effortless with the knowledge and experience of that failure under our belts. And there’s simply no way forward in life without failure.

#4 – Using Failure as Leverage

If you’ve failed in life, you can use that as leverage to not only recover from it, but to help propel you forward in the future. Failure can be a great a platform for growth that is simply unmatched.
To leverage your failures, you have to illuminate them to your mind. Write out what you failed at and why you failed. Did you have deep enough meaning to your goals in the past? What could you have done differently?
How will you tackle those failures in the future when you’re faced with them? How will you learn from the past to help shape a bigger and brighter future?
Failure isn’t the end of the road as long as you don’t give up. If you still believe in your goals, you can use the failure as leverage to push past the old limitations of your past.

#5 – Revisit Your Goals

Did you have clear and concrete goals in the past? Revisit your goals from the past and look at just how clear you were with your goals. Were they precise and exact? Did you visualize them in your mind?
Sometimes, failure results from not setting goals the right way. Not only must we set goals the right way, but we must track and analyze them on a monthly, weekly, and daily basis.
To recover from failure, revisit your goals and redefine them. Spend the time necessary to analyze and adjust where necessary.

#6 – Create a Massive Action Plan

Want to recover from failure? Create a Massive Action Plan. Take your goals and lay out a plan as to how you’re going to achieve them. What will you do in the face of failure next time it rears its ugly head?
When we have a massive action plan, we have a systematic way of achieving the goals that we set for ourselves. Once we come to the realization that those goals won’t be simple to achieve, we can approach things with a more long-term frame-of-mind.
Set out a solid action plan that will help you push past the stumbling blocks of life, and watch as you slowly but surely recover from any setbacks, upsets, or failures.