By: D. A. Slinkard
Nobody likes to fail and I mean nobody. Every one of us, we like winning – we like getting the promotion – reaching the goal – closing the deal – losing weight – building the business and seeing hard work pay off. Who doesn’t love having a story with a happy ending?
What about when life brings on failure and we take the “L”? I know the majority of us would rather leave that chapter out of our lives but the problem is you cannot pursue anything worthwhile without eventually experiencing failure. At some point, we will all fail at something and it is not a matter of if, but when. There will be plans that do not work, opportunities you miss, decisions you regret, and goals you fail to reach.
The question we must answer is how we respond when failure happens and we need to realize that failure does not shape who we are – it is just an event in life. One of the biggest mistakes we make is turning something that happened into something that defines us. We need to remember there is a tremendous difference between saying, “I failed” and saying, “I am a failure.”
Maybe the business didn’t work. Maybe you didn’t get the job. Maybe you made a terrible financial decision. Maybe you set a goal in January and abandoned it by February. Maybe you tried something you genuinely believed would work, only to watch it fall apart. Guess what? Who cares — because failure becomes dangerous when we allow it to become our identity.
Everyone fails, and the difference is how we respond when life does not go our way. Give up or get up – the choice is ours to make. In fact, failure can be a great teacher and has a way of teaching lessons that success sometimes cannot. When something fails, don’t waste the experience. We need to learn from it and look at every experience – good or bad – as always something we can learn from.
If failure costs you money, make sure you purchase a lesson with it. If failure costs you time, make sure you gain wisdom from it. If failure embarrasses you, let it produce humility. The only failure that is completely wasted is the failure from which we refuse to learn. Don’t allow for failure to keep you from getting back up and trying one more time.
We cannot be afraid to take chances – to set even bigger goals or even trying new things. We have one shot at life and we need to be intentional with how we live our lives. Part of our problem is that many of us go through life on cruise control; we check out and then wonder what happened or how we ended up where we are at – and that’s why I say we must be intentional.
If life does not go our way, there are one of two ways that we can respond. The first way is to blame someone else or even something else. How easy is it for us to blame the economy, your boss, your employees, your parents, your spouse, your circumstances, or even bad luck? If everything is always someone else’s fault, you surrender your ability to improve.
The other way to respond is to take ownership and admit when we could have handled something better. This goes back to learning from our mistakes, and it is not going to be easy at first because society is teaching us daily to pass the buck to someone or something else.
You need to learn from what you did wrong; correct what you can correct, and then just move forward. We cannot change yesterday, but we can absolutely allow yesterday to change how we approach tomorrow. We need to have the thought process that our next decision matters more than our last failure.
Again, we cannot go backward and rewrite what happened, but we can decide what happens next. Sometimes the most important decision is deciding to get back up one more time. Start over one more time. Apologize one more time. Rebuild one more time. No matter what, though, we just need to decide to do it one more time.
Success often belongs to people who learned how to fail without allowing failure to finish them. So when you fall—and eventually we all do—don’t spend the rest of your life staring at the ground. Learn the lesson; make the adjustments; and get back up and keep moving forward.
By: D. A. Slinkard
D.A. Slinkard would love your feedback. You can contact him at da.slinkard@gmail.com
