Chapter 16. Failure = feedback
Your attitude towards failure can make or break your success. If you allow failure to
de-motivate you and you decide to give up, success will not be yours.
If you give up, that’s it. It’s over. You will never get what you set your heart out to
achieve. If you keep trying, you’ll get there, even if it takes a lifetime.
What do a baby and Thomas Edison have in common? They both kept on trying till
they got it! Thomas Edison made many light bulbs (apparently about 99 attempts)
before he finally created one that worked – imagine if he had given up after his first
‘failure’? Look at a baby learning to walk – how many times do they fall down before
they get it right? Imagine if the baby never tried again after the first fall.
Never, ever give up!
One of the greatest stumbling blocks to your success is the fear of failure. If you’re
avoiding taking action because you’re afraid that you might fail, you’re limiting your
life hugely. Through life’s knocks and falls, somehow you learnt to fear failure. You
beat yourself up whenever you make a mistake. At school you got big red marks
scribbled across ‘bad’ tests. At school you either failed or you passed. Did anyone ask
you what you learnt in the process of ‘failing’? Did anyone ask you what you can do
differently in the future? Did anyone offer to support you in going forward? Probably
not. If you failed, you got into trouble and that was that. It’s no wonder that so many
people have developed a fear of failure.
This fear is often carried into the workplace where your success is measured by your
performance on the last project. One of the best ways of finding out how you are
doing is to ask for feedback from your colleagues or boss (or even your spouse). Very
often, you don’t ask for feedback because you’re terrified that it may be negative.
If you were able to get this feedback, you would be able to adjust your actions, do
something differently so that you can improve on it. By not asking for feedback, you
are missing out on crucial learning.
You may also have difficulty forgiving yourself when you get it wrong. If you fail, you
might want to hide your failure and never try again. What happened? You started