Everyone has had at least one (but most likely many) failures in all aspects of their lives. Personal and professional, failure is defined by a “lack of success” or “the omission of expected or required action”.

While failure is a word we tend to shy away from and try to forest or ignore our own shortcomings, failure is something everyone faces, but not everyone can use it to their advantage.

How can you use failure to your advantage? 

Simple. Realize that there’s NO such thing as failure, just experience that you can use to your advantage. 

Imagine you’ve gotten your first skateboard. You’re trying to make your first ollie, but you keep messing up and getting it wrong. 5, 8,10, perhaps even 20 times or more, and you still haven’t gotten it. 

Does that count as a failure? 

No!

The only way you’ll get to your goal of mastering the ollie is by trying – and that means you’ll continue fall over, drop the board, until you get it right.

Is falling or dropping the board a failure or simply a lesson?

That’s right.

In the real world, the most successful athletes have failed more times than they’ve won. 

If you try and avoid failure, you’re not really living life at all – and you’ve failed by default. 

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.” — J.K. Rowling

Think of your most important goal. What is the biggest threat to your success? 

Fear of failure.

Fear of failure has captured millions of people who are stuck and struggling to find fulfillment in life, paralyzed by this broken mindset of fear of failure.

Do you want to be stuck in the loop of being scared to try, or accomplish your goals and dreams? 

If you agree with the latter, you’ll need to get over those fears, as that is the only way you will ever achieve big goals in life is by trying again, getting back up and trying again, and again, and again, and again…and as many times as it takes until success happens. 

Successful athletes often say that they have learned as much from their failures as they have from their successes. You might think that doesn’t make any sense – wouldn’t you learn more from the times things go right, than the times when everything falls apart? 

The Truth May Surprise You

The truth may surprise you. Among the advantages of turning the mindset of “failure” to one of “learning experiences” are these:

• Failure underlines the need to take risks. Yeah, it’s a cliché you’ve heard before – no risk, no reward. If you are taking risks of any kind, you are going to fail at some point….but if you never ever try to take a risk for something greater in life, you can guarantee that you will live an unfulfilling life, which will be the biggest failure of all. 
• Success can breed self-satisfaction. If you have an easy and successful path all the time, chances are you will stop trying to improve and level up – you can always go higher.
• Failure can force you to rethink every assumption. When you run into a challenge or problem, you’ll need to consider the various ways you could go about fixing and getting around that problem or obstacle. You’ll be leveling-up your thinking to not just creative problem-solving solutions, but will also need to identify those broader elements that have led to the issue cropping up. While you do this, you’ll have the experience for the future times when similar issues come up, and can combat them quickly and efficiently, which will lead you not just to becoming a stronger and more well-rounded person, but back to the path of success quicker. 
• It can be difficult to convince yourself that failure is all right. Nearly all of us are hardwired to believing that not following your outlined path to success 100% or having some kind of setback is a failure on your part. You need to remind yourself that it is okay to make mistakes and that obstacles, setbacks and challenges are to be expected. Every great athlete in the world has their own trials and tribulations, but public and private. What makes them great is that no matter how hard the fight it is, they continue on, marching towards their goals and ambitions and not wasting time fretting over their mistakes. 
• You need to make mistakes in order to get better. It’s really simple. If you are not making mistakes, you most likely are not trying hard enough and if you think that every moment you are practicing or competing will be 100% perfect, then you are bound to fail. If you flip it around and use everything – even those gut-wrenching moments where you missed out by a split second – to your advantage and say, “what can I learn from this?” You are already better than most.

A Different Perspective 

• How many years did it take for Tony Hawk to become the legend that he is today?
• How many trials before Thomas Edison came up with the first light bulb?
• How many years did the mankind take to successfully land on moon?
• How many attempts did it take for humans to climb Mount Everest?
• How many attempts did it take for you to try and land a perfect Ollie on your skateboard? 

When you try and do something that requires skill and practice, you are not going to succeed in the first attempt. And probably not the second or third, either. And you won’t become proficient at it until you do it a hundred times over and can preform it with your eyes closed.

We have to make a certain number of attempts at anything before we achieve success. Instead of saying “I failed”, let’s not those attempts “failures”.

Let us call them just attempts.

They were our “attempts” to get successful.

And if you continue to try and try again and not let those attempts at greatness defeat you, you’ll realize that the world is literally your oyster, and the sky is the limit for what is possible. 

It just starts with you attempting, and not stopping until those attempts turn into success.

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