Why You Should Fall In Love With Failure

You will fail.

You will fail and you should not be fearful of this. I have known too many people in my life who have never tried, never even attempted to execute an idea, all because they are terrified that they might fail. This mindset is not only limiting (you are guaranteed failure if you never try) but if you enter in to a project with this negative mindset you are much more likely to fail.

‘Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm’ – Winston Churchill

I’ve had lots of failures and I am so thankful for each one. Without them I would not be here today.

In 2005 I tried to start a company. I had no idea what I was doing, but I figured I would have a go at it. It can’t be that hard.. right? I bought a large inventory (about $10k worth of stuff) made the worlds worst website, had nearly no marketing strategy and was actually afraid to talk to possible customers.

If you look really hard, you can see small pieces of my pride somewhere in there..

Wanna talk about failure? That stunt surpassed failure and went straight to absolute devastation.

I tried trading FOREX a few years ago. I was making a lot of money for about 6 months. I was stoked. It was the easiest money I’d ever made. But I wasn’t paying attention to the laws – the CFTC changed the rules and my broker (who was in the UK) needed to transfer all of my funds to a US account and reduce my leverage by about 4 times. For those who may not be familiar, what this basically means is that all of my open trades, which totaled $x, would now total 4 times that amount. (If I had $1,000 in outstanding trades, suddenly I’d have $4,000 in outstanding trades, and I needed the balance in my account to cover it)

The change occurred, and I took a huge, huge hit. All of the money I made in 6 months was wiped back down to $0.

Colossal failure.

I had the thought of starting a blog about a year ago with 2 of my friends. I had no idea how to use WordPress, never mind customize it to make a website look decent. We had no direction, no ambition, and the fly-by-night project quickly dissolved into the air from which it was drawn.

Do you hear the failboat at the dock? *Ouuuun Ouuuuunnnn* 

Alll aboooarrd!

Once I even got hosed by one of those ‘Buy this totally automated online system and start generating huge amounts of cash in 24 hours!’ Ugh. Those jerks!

As awful as each failure was they all taught me something that I found useful later on. Most of the knowledge that I have today comes from failures.

If you are afraid to fail, or you are very disappointed when you do fail, you will not be open to the very important lessons that failure offers. This is not to say that you should try to fail – I do not recommend this – you should always be aiming for success. But if failure happens (and failure will happen) you should be ready to embrace that failure for all it’s worth and soak up every lesson that failure has to teach you.

You are not truly defeated until you give up on yourself. No failure is final unless you allow it to be final. You are in control of this, even after you have failed (which may have been outside of your control) and that is the most important realization you can make regarding your progress.

Progress is actually success in its final form. Success is relative – you may appear successful to others, but from your own perspective you may see more opportunities for progress ahead of you. Success is a goal that you decide for yourself and not a measurement set forth by others. No one else can define success for you, however they may see you as successful. What is important, though, is to continue to progress.

And success and progress will never happen if you are afraid to try, afraid to fail, or so discouraged by your failures that you do not learn from them.

What seriously important lessons have you learned from a failure?

Mushroom cloud nuclear testing photo from EpicFireworks – used under Creative Commons – Check out Epic’s work!