Many people are taught to adopt a negative attitude towards failure. However, I believe it’s one of the best things that can happen to a person. Failure is a blessing in disguise.

Maybe you have goals this year to lose weight or take your health more seriously. Maybe you’d like to start that business you’ve always dreamed of… I don’t know about you but I learn by failing! Yes, no one is perfect and no one knows all the answers! That’s why failures make you great! 

From personal experience, I’ve noticed failure is correlated with success in three ways:

1. Failure implies having that you have actually made an attempt
2. Failure forces you to acknowledge shortcomings and/or defeat and helps you discover room for improvement
3. Failure makes you stronger and more resilient

Failure Implies That You Have Made An Attempt

“The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.”
— Stephen McCranie

If you’ve recently failed at something, it implies that you’ve done something that many people hesitate to do in the first place: you’ve actually made an attempt at success.

I learned by failing at the first Marketing and Graphic Design Agency I worked for in Denver, CO. I had a Senior Designer above me who critiqued everything I did and pointed out every imperfection and mistake, nothing I did was ever good enough to her. This of course lit a fire in me and made me hungry for more. I put up a fight, I stayed later, I worked harder, I wasn’t satisfied. Failing and not meeting someone’s expectations is a challenge, and a hard lesson, however, it allows us to grow and learn.

Staying within your comfort zone and doing nothing is worse than putting yourself out there. It’s difficult for people (well for me at least) to put aside one’s ego and realize that in the long run, it’s always better to have tried and failed than to have done nothing at all.

Failure Forces You to Acknowledge Defeat

“The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.”
— M. Scott Peck

Being defeated sometimes is a good thing, it helps us grow, learn from our own experiences and test out what really works that’s why I’m sharing this!

Those who frequently fail also have the greatest clarity as to how they can improve and grow.

Failure Makes You Stronger and More Resilient

“Success is 99% failure.”
— Soichiro Honda

Failure is something that you can’t avoid. In fact, we’re all hard-wired to learn by trial and error, which makes failure built into how we grow. Anyone who has failed can attest, the mindset and experience you gain from failure are rewards in of themselves.

I reflected back many times to that Senior designer and the lessons I learned from her. This experience helped me push myself, it challenged me to acknowledge my own defeat and helped me grow a thicker skin. Years later I realized my Senior Designer was teaching me a lesson and pushing me towards being a better designer, in the end making me more resilient.

All we can do is keep trying our best! If you only make one promise this year, let it be to simply try your best! And to look towards the future with optimism.

Learn to love failure. Learn to learn from failure. And most of all, never let the fear of failure alter the goals you set out to achieve.