At different points in your life, you’ll invent goals for yourself based on your passions or hobbies. Maybe you dream about opening an online store where you sell handmade goods. You might want to rise to the top of a company and work out of the corner office in a New York skyscraper.
It’s great to have a vision for your life, but sometimes you’ll experience failure on the road to your goals. It may not happen from a lack of effort. Failure comes in all shapes and sizes, sometimes unexpectedly.
Read on to learn why you need to fail to succeed in life. Whether you’ve recently experienced a setback or want to know what to do in the future, you’ll learn the importance of embracing your mistakes so you can conquer what you set out for yourself.
Failure Creates Strength
Before you ever imagined what you wanted to do, you had to consider if you had the strength to do it. You could have weighed your academic strengths before enrolling in a master’s program, thinking you could handle anything that came your way.
Now you’re up against a rigorous courseload and a professor who doesn’t hand out A’s easily. You may feel like you’re up against something you might not be able to handle. Elizabeth Gilbert felt the same way.
The famous author of Eat, Pray, Love said she tried to get published for six consecutive years, waking up to new rejection notices in her mailbox every day. In 2014, she gave an inspiring TED Talk where she said, “My failure pushed me to find my resolve and never quit,” even when she was devastated.
Develop personal strength from persisting failures and keep going. You may be the next guest to present on stage next.
You Learn to Adapt
One minute, you have your goals figured out. You know which steps will take you to each part of the process, but then life happens and your plan falls apart. When you look at failure in the face, it leads to creative solutions because you have to think on your feet.
Once you know what you can handle — like performing well under pressure — you’ll become more familiar with your skills and carry a new sense of confidence.
You Show Your True Self
Imagine that you’ve planned to become a journalist, but you can’t seem to get hired in any open job positions. That abrupt stop in your plans will give you time to learn about your true self.
Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, was fired from his own company at age 30. In a commencement speech, he said, “I was a very public failure, and even thought about running away from [Silicon] valley.”
It was only after Jobs had time to reflect that he realized he still loved what he did. He went on to start NeXT and Pixar, which merged his love of technology with pushing creative boundaries. Eventually, returned to Apple and NeXT fueled Apple’s path forward to become the leading tech company they are today.
Embrace any momentary pause in life that failure brings. Reflect what you loved about what you were trying to do and if it aligns with your identity. If it does, you’ll find a new way to redirect your passions into something that may turn out to be more wonderful than whatever you planned before.
Failure Comes From Trying
No matter how many years of experience, training or education you’ve earned, trying and failing come hand in hand. While giving a speech at Harvard, Oprah once addressed the graduating class and said, “If you’re constantly pushing yourself higher and higher, the law of averages predicts that you will, at some point, fall.”
Success won’t happen if you don’t try, and you won’t make any significant efforts without failing. Learn from your mistakes so you come back stronger and with a better idea of your true self. You’ll redefine how to accurately achieve your goals and be better for it.
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