Don't fear failure – embrace it!
When I was in school 'fail' was a very negative word. Nobody wants to fail or worse still ‘be a failure’. We all want to get great results in our exams. If we play games, we want to win. If we create a YouTube channel, we want it to be successful. We want followers and lots of them - anything else would be a failure - right?
It turns out that failure is a reality, and we can’t really avoid it. It’s always been that way. When we were small babies (and I think I’m covering everyone here!), we failed many times to pick up that spoon before we were eventually successful. When we tried to sit up for ourselves, we fell over many times before we learned to stabilise our bodies in that sitting position. When learning to walk we fell over hundreds of times before we took our first step. It didn’t stop us. Thankfully, we didn’t fear failure - what is failure? If we feared failing, we never would have learned to pick up that spoon or learned to walk. Learning is made up of falling over and over until we succeed. We can’t just do something for the first time and be experts. It takes time, and if you want to be really good, it takes lots of time. All the things we learn that are worthwhile take time; for example, learning musical instruments, becoming competent at a new sport, or mastering games or other hobbies. We are going to fail many times before we master them.
Engineers and scientists can’t fear failure. Developing a new product, service or scientific method will often take years and see many failures before there is success. You see, failure is fine so long as we learn from it. That’s the idea. We fail, we learn from that failure, we adjust, and we try again. Maybe we fail again and the cycle repeats.
Fear can lead us to be stressed and if we get stressed over long periods of time that can deplete our immune system and make us sick. When we take on new things or try to learn new skills, we must get comfortable with failing. It happens. It will happen to all of us at times. It’s meant to happen. It’s ok. We learn from it. The other amazing thing about failure is that, in my experience, we learn a lot when we do fail. When things ‘just work out’ we tend not to think about it. We move on. When we fail, we dig in deep, we have to understand why we failed. During that process we learn the most.
So, we should look at all the babies out there with smiles on their faces. They fall over, they get back up, they smile and laugh. It’s a game. The game of life and learning. Part of it is failing - success comes around every now and then! Embrace failure. By embracing it you will be more open to opportunities. You’ll try new things. You’ll master new things. You’ll be embracing life and you’ll certainly make life that bit more interesting.