Embrace Failure? Hug it? Love on it? What?

Well, given that failure has occurred (and I assure you, it will occur again… and again… and yet again; such is life!), what are you going to do? Run from it? Well, you could but odds are you will be losing a growth opportunity, a learning lesson. Failure is a teacher and the lessons will REPEAT until we learn! So learn already! Failure teaches us where we need to do the work, how to do better next time.

Accept mistakes as a normal, inevitable part of life. Plan for failure, create contingencies and reserves to absorb the impact, then roll with the setbacks and build on them. As a youth, I took judo and was taught how to take a fall, to duck, curl and roll to both dissipate the energy and to use it to pop up into a fighting stance. Resilience and perseverance are the true keys to success, not the complete and total absence of mistakes. Show me someone who never fails and I’ll show you someone who never risks, never pushes their limits, thus committing the greatest failure of them all! Of course, the 2nd greatest failure of all is to fail to learn from your failure!

Closing quotes:

“The better a man is, the more mistakes he will make, for the more new things he will try. I would never promote to a top-level job a man who was not making mistakes…otherwise he is sure to be mediocre.” – Peter Druker 

“He is foolish to blame the sea who is shipwrecked twice.” – Publilius Syrus 

“We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure. It is a powerful obstacle to growth. It assures the progressive narrowing of the personality and prevents exploration and experimentation. There is no learning without some difficulty and fumbling. If you want to keep on learning, you must keep on risking failure all your life.” – John W. Gardner 

“In some attempts, it is glorious even to fail.” – Vince Lombardi

As always, I share what I most want and need to learn. – Nathan S. Collier