Most of the time, failing is the last thing we want to go through. It comes with a lot of negative emotions. We don’t want to face anxiety, self-doubt, and disappointment. We just want to be successful.
Here’s the thing: failure is part of becoming successful. Failing plays a crucial, if not necessary, role in leading us to success. It’s part of the learning and growth process.
I didn’t realize the importance of failure until much later in life. I’ve always been a competitive person growing up. Failure wasn’t an option. It wasn’t an option until I learned that failure is there to help us succeed.
Here’s how bouncing back from failure sets us up for success:
1. It highlights your weaknesses and points out room for improvement.
As humans, we often suck at gauging our capabilities. Your self-image and biases make you either underestimate or overestimate yourself. To accurately determine your abilities, you need a measure and feedback. That’s where failure comes in.
Failure pushes you to reflect on your mistakes and what areas you are lacking. It points out the weaknesses that you often avoid recognizing. That’s why failing hurts because it highlights the truth – you suck at something.
If you learn to push through the pain, the truth that arose from failure becomes a learning opportunity. Failure identifies the areas you need to improve on. It points out the steps you need to take to fill in the gap. It will give you awareness so you can move forward.
2. It builds resilience and persistence.
Failure is just a temporary setback. When you bounce back, you get better. As the saying goes, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”
The negative feelings from failure will probably never go away. It will always try to discourage you. But I have a secret for you: when you fail a lot, you get used to it.
Every time you experience failure, it exposes you to the negative feelings that come along with it. The more failure exposes you to those feelings, the more you’ll realize that they’re not as bad as you perceive them to be.
Now, our perception can vary from person to person. People under pressure from peers and family might not handle failure as well as others. That’s ok. What’s important is that you learn from it no matter what pace you are following.
As you learn to handle failure better, you develop resilience. You become less affected by the fleeting negative sentiments of failure. Increasing degrees of failure become more manageable.
Resilience goes hand in hand with persistence. Knowing that you can pick yourself up after failing makes you less likely to give up. You become more persevering and will continue to focus on achieving your goals.
3. It encourages creativity and innovation.
Sometimes failure doesn’t mean you aren’t good enough to achieve your goal. Rather, it can mean an approach you used isn’t right for the job.
Failure can be your guidepost. It tells you which path is wrong and whether you should try another way. It’ll continue to guide you until you find the right path.
This reason is my favorite aspect of failure. By continuously telling you where not to go, failing encourages you to try something else. It pushes you to try something new. It nurtures creativity and innovation within us.
With every failure that comes your way, you get a roadblock. Once every roadblock is in place, and it obstructs every obvious route, you’ll learn to pave your path. You’ll be able to create your solutions.
While not all solutions you create may apply to every challenge you face, bouncing back from failing equips you with the capability to adapt. You learn that you can continue trying until you get the needed answers.
Through failures, we become problem solvers.
Final words
Our mindset often holds us back from maximizing our development from failure. Failure is subjective and relative. How we respond to it can significantly impact what we learn from our failures.
Put failure in a bad light, and you will succumb to the darkness of fear, shame, and inadequacy. But if you embrace and appreciate failure, it becomes a transformative opportunity. It will become your stepping stone to success.
