If you aren’t failing, you aren’t trying hard enough.
At first glance this sentence seems incorrect. It seems wrong. Especially for someone like me, who always wants to win. Someone who hates failing.
It took me a long time to realize that failure is an important part of success.
Failing forward
When I was originally trying to get my book published I had to go through a lot of rejection. The most common type of response I received was nothing. Silence. I would send off a query letter and never hear a word back. Was my query even received? Did I write it wrong? Did they think my work was garbage? Did they even open it? Most often I never knew the answers to these questions. It got to the point where I would got a weird kind of joy from receiving a rejection letter. I figured at least a response was a result. It meant something was happening. I was moving forward, even if forward wasn’t exactly where I wanted to go.
This same idea has been shared by many successful people.
The greatest basketball player of all time was cut from his high school basketball team. Michael Jordan said, “I have failed over and over in my life and that’s why I succeed.”
Thomas Edison looked at failure this way. “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Process of elimination. The inventor eventually found the one way that would.
J.K. Rowling noted: “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well have not lived at all. In which case, you fail by default.”
Persistence
Failing, making mistakes, and getting rejected are all steps in the process of moving toward success.
Mistakes are a fact of life. The key to making failure work for you instead of against you is persistence. Persistence is the ingredient that makes mistakes and failure come together in the right order to make something better than the individual ingredients could ever be themselves.
One last example: author James Lee Burke wrote a booked called The Lost Get-Back Boogie. He tried to get it published but was rejected 111 times over the course of nine years. He was turned down 111 times! He endured 9 years of rejection! That’s persistence. The Lost Get-Back Boogie was finally published in 1986….and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
Always remember that failing and failure aren’t the same thing. The best thing about failing is that it gets you closer to your goal. In one way or another.
