Can you believe that too much success can be a bad thing? What if someone just succeeds all the time at everything they do without ever knowing one single failure? Then, one day when failure finally strikes, what will they do? How will they manage? Now imagine someone else who has known constant failures and setbacks throughout his life – constant rejections, bankruptcies and upheavals. Imagine this person coping with one more little failure. That’s right, person one, is a gibbering nervous wreck, unable to face the world. This one gigantic failure has completely bowed them and they do not know how to cope or what to do. While our constantly failing person two is just sitting and waiting for it to be over; just one more failure in his long list. Oh well, get up, move on.
A few failures in life happen to everyone. No matter what your scale of measurement or emotional pain threshold is, you will find something to test you and see if you are strong enough. Just like a plant that grows stronger after being pruned hard, a person who lives through several failures, or even just one big one is stronger and more able to cope with anything that life throws at him.
It is for this very reason that failure must not be feared. There is no point! If you do not succeed, it does not make you a failure, it just means that what you did at that point in your life did not work. Stop doing that and try something else.
The problem with failure is that it has so many emotions wrapped up in it that it becomes memorable. For some people, if they think back on their lives, all they can remember are just a string of dramatic failures one after the other, connected with a delicate, tentative life-thread. It is as if these people can not remember anything good or successful ever happening in their lives. And yet there must have been something – something in their youth, or childhood that did lead them to also have positive experiences.
And, if you examine the lives of highly successful people whom you admire and look up to, they will all have a gigantic flop at some point in their lives. Very few people hit the ground running. It is sometimes very helpful to read people’s biographies to see how they have made it to where they are. Very rarely do you find people who have just gone up and up. If there is someone like that, it is because they have inherited a family business or been given a leg up from the start.
In order to succeed from your failures you must stop associating negative emotions with them. A little bit of sadness and regret is absolutely normal, but after that, forget the emotion and move on completely. The only thing to take away from a failure is to learn how it happened and to make sure it won’t happen again. Remember the old saying: fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me!
