As Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” If he’d given up after the first attempt we might still be in the dark!
Great things can take a while to get right – but if you give up because you tried a few times and then considered all the effort a failure, then you really have failed.
Ever heard the phrase ‘there is no failure, only feedback’? It’s one of those gems worth remembering because it means exactly that…
The next time you attempt something and it doesn’t work out, look at it as feedback… Maybe there’s another way of doing this until you get it ‘right’ … Or, maybe you’ll end up in a different place entirely with a whole new set of possibilities which would be pretty exciting! By looking at everything as a journey you can start to appreciate that it’s about what it takes to get somewhere or achieve something, and not always about the outcome itself. Sometimes it’s in the doing that we learn and grow.
And, in doing this you’ll be on an endless path of self-discovery… Having the courage to push forward, understanding that there is no failure, only feedback, you can gather information and harness experience and turn it all into wisdom which can have an incredible impact on what you create for yourself.
And, in all honesty, the most significant step on your own personal journey of transformation and creating the life that you want for yourself is the way you view failure. Really, it’s that simple!
Because … if you don’t get it right the first time, when you learn to objectively (cut out the emotion) and look at the experience as a whole to understand what you can learn from it, that’s when you begin to sow the seeds of success.
The statement ‘I have failed’ is miserable to look at on paper. It’s miserable to say, and the reason that it’s miserable is because it allows for no movement. It keeps you stuck. Motionless. At a dead end.
BUT … when you shift your mindset to one of seeking feedback, you will automatically start to find inspiration and motivation in the ways you might approach the task or situation differently next time.
Questions to ask yourself:
– What can I do to improve my situation?
– What lessons can I learn from this?
– What will I do differently next time?
– What positive outcome/s can I take from this experience?
It is a paradox of life that you have to learn to look at failure as feedback in order to succeed… By seeing the opportunity for revision and improvement, even though things hadn’t turned out quite the way you’d hoped or expected, then your feedback is information to enable you to seek revision or improvement.
If we create a habit of thinking there is no such thing as failure then eventually we will cease to fail and success will be accomplished with relative ease.
Allow yourself the space to realise that your perceptions are a representation of the actual situation. They represent your internal map, which is not the world, and therefore, if you want to create the life you want, then you have to make conscious choices that are conducive to your growth.
As the late Napoleon Hill once said ‘every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of equal or greater benefit.’
Success is yours. You just have to believe it.
