“Ever tried, ever failed, no matter. Try again, fail again, fail better.” — Samuel Beckett
One of the most inspirational speeches that I heard recently was a speech given by Peter Dinklage addressing Bennington College, his alma mater.
A few of my favourite lines from the speech are as follows.
“Raise the rest of your life to meet you. Don’t search for defining moments, because they will never come. The moments that define you have already happened. And they will already happen again.”
“Don’t wait until they tell you you are ready. The world might say you are not allowed to, yet. I waited a long time out in the world, before I gave myself permission to fail. Please, don’t even bother asking. Don’t bother telling the world you are ready. Show it. Do it.”
It took Peter Dinklage eight years after graduation to realise that he was leaving behind his dreams of being an actor of stage and screen. Peter Dinklage detailed his turning point, when he quit his job and decided to focus on his acting career, through one simple line: “When I was 29, I told myself — the next acting job I get, no matter what it pays, I will, from now on, for better or worse, be a working actor.”
His words do not just remind us to be mindful of the fact that we might fail, and that we might be afraid of the changes that come about in our lives, but that if we have got a goal in mind, we must chase it with all our might.
“Fall down seven times, stand up eight.” — Japanese Proverb
Altering our mindset is critical in achieving success. If we view failure as a necessary step to achieving progress, then we have a chance. Failure is a lesson that teaches us that the way in which we chose to tackle a problem was wrong. It does not mean that we have exhausted all avenues for exploration. Failure breeds understanding of the things that need to be fixed in order to achieve success. Instead of feeling bad about the failures one goes through, it is better to understand where he/she went wrong and succeed in it the next time.
Would you rather live with the regret of doing something and failing, fully aware of the outcome of your actions, or forever wonder at what may have been had you acted? Doing something may result in failure but it affords you the opportunity to learn and improve from what you have experienced and critically improve performance thereafter. Failure is merely the discovery of one way of doing something that doesn’t work. Regret is never exploring any means of achieving anything.
Doing nothing can only ever result in regret. It can never lead to learning or creating anything of value and therefore regret is debilitating and paralysing.
Failure is about learning; regret is about never knowing. Bravery is accepting failure as an opportunity. Regret is lacking the courage to act.
Failure is an opportunity to improve. Failure is only failure if you fail to learn. Fail smarter and never regret anything you ever set out to achieve.
According to me, regret is more painful than failure because we can fail after trying but regret is a failure even before trying. Failures are a part of life. They are the proof that at least you are trying.
I like to think of failures as mistakes. And one should never be afraid to commit a mistake as those mistakes can be the stepping stone for a lesson and ensure that we do not commit the same mistake again.
Is failure really necessary to appreciate success? Shouldn’t it be easier to watch somebody else try and fail than watching yourself fail? Will I be happier if I never fail? Is failure the seed one needs to grow themselves? Why are people so scared of failures? Why do people not try something new for the risk of failing?
Failure has been glorified in today’s world. People tell us it is okay to fail and one should not be afraid to fail at something. But in reality, each failure can have an adverse effect on us and make us scare to try to something again. We can cripple ourselves analysing why we made the mistake, our mind tricking us into thinking it’s irreversible, that we can’t move past this.
The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.
Failure starts where success ends, and it defines the limits of success. Success often follows failure, since it frequently occurs after other options have been tried and failed.
“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” — Sir Arthur C. Clarke
“The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.” The winning approach of famous Formula One racing driver Mario Andretti was embodied in his view that “If things seem under control, you’re just not going fast enough!” If we always play it safe and remain in our comfort zone, then we may not experience failure, but we may also be missing out on possible areas of success that could be easily exploited.
Thomas Edison claimed to have successfully found a hundred ways not to invent the light bulb before ultimately discovering the incandescent filament. Danish physicist Niels Bohr defined an expert as “a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field”. More generally, Robert Kennedy declared that “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly”.
In order to reach innovation, it is necessary to push through failures until success is found. In this case not succeeding is a result of giving up too soon, losing momentum or running out of energy. Persistence in the face of failure is rewarded eventually with success. As the British wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill advised, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
The famous American comedian WC Fields advised “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no point being a damn fool about it!” The trick is to know when to give up or change direction, and to understand the difference between a situation needing persistence and a pointless quest for unachievable success. This is well expressed in the anonymous Serenity Prayer:
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; The courage to change the things that I can; And the wisdom to know the difference.”
Everyone wants to be a success. No one wants to be a failure. And understandably so. Success and failure, however, are terms meant to define events, not people. You are either successful at doing something, or achieving some milestone, or you failed at doing something or did not achieve some milestone. That does not imply that you are a complete success or a complete failure. There are other aspects of you that you may not be so successful at, or that you may not be such a failure at.
One needs to see success and failure as temporary events in our life, not permanent life-defining states of being. In the words of John Wooden, “Success is never final, failure is never fatal. It’s courage that counts.”
Success is moving forward, to arrive at the destination in more ways than one. Failure is giving up hope and not finding those other options to achieve goals.
How to define success in life? The only person that can answer the question above is you. Every person is thinking differently about being prosperous in life and is defining success in another way, so there can’t exist a definition that is suitable for all.
One of the most important key steps to achieving success in life is to know the meaning of success for your personal life. The true meaning of success goes far beyond the common definitions of success, such as having a lot of money, being wealthy, having a lot of tangibles and earned degrees. Quite the opposite: true success in life cannot be measured with the above-named factors, but instead with the amount of people that are able to live a better and more advanced life because of what you created. This is the meaning of success.
“Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure.” — George Edward Woodberry
What distinguishes great people is that they did not become a victim to their failures. When they fell down, they got back up. And when people told them it couldn’t be done, they refused to buy into their lack of belief.
There are things that you and only you can do. Things that will never be done if you do not do them. But any worthwhile accomplishment is going to call on you to trust in yourself more fully, to risk mistakes and reframe your failures as all par the course of what it takes you to succeed. Most of all, it will take stepping out of your comfort zone again and again, no matter how loud that little voice of doubt is screaming in your head to play it safe, turn back or give up.
How you choose to interpret your failures will either move you forward in life or hold you back. Every failure can be turned into a stepping stone to success. Every mistake is a lesson in what not to do. Every setback is an opportunity to dig deeper in to yourself, to access resources you didn’t know you have and to acquire wisdom you could gain no other way.
Every story of success is also a story of risking failure again and again yet never being defined by it. Failure is an essential ingredient of success.
“If you’ve never failed, you’ve never lived” is how the saying goes. Failure is probably one of the aspects in life most people are afraid of. But the truth is: everyone has failed and everyone will fail again. We sometimes forget that all successful people have failed, but they did not stop after their failures. They stood up and tried again, time after time. We tend to think that people who are successful were just lucky, it just fell into their laps or they just had the right connections.
When people are successful, we always focus on their success, not on the years of struggle, failure and trying again and again. We only see the bright side and don’t want to or forget about the years of hard work, while those years mostly bring the most inspiring and motivational stories.
So, do not be afraid of failure, it is a part of your road to success.
“The quickest road to success is to possess an attitude toward failure of ‘no fear’” — Ralph Heath
Failure is life’s greatest teacher. Failing will happen, no matter how hard you try to avoid it, so you might as well have a ‘no fear’ attitude towards it. This does not mean you should expect to fail, but when it happens accept it.
“One of the biggest secrets to success is operating inside your strength zone but outside of your comfort zone.” — Ralph Heath
Failure will make you reach your potential. In order to reach your ultimate potential, your personal best and to make the ‘impossible’ possible, you need to push yourself, go to the absolute limits and definitely not fear failure. When you have a no fear attitude and embrace failure it will maximize your motivation, determination and perseverance.
We need the learn, evaluate and listen to other people if we want to see what needs to change in order to succeed.
We all feel an emotional low after we have failed, that is natural, human and inevitable. But how we respond to our failures is what determines our road to success. If you feel an emotional low after you have failed, read or listen to stories of people like Oprah Winfrey or J.K. Rowling and their journey to where they are now, this will help you get through your emotional low, get motivation and move on.
“If I become complacent and don’t take risks, someone will notice what I am doing and improve upon my efforts over time, and put me out of work. You’ve got to keep finding better ways to run your life, or someone will take what you’ve accomplished, improve upon it, and be very pleased with the results. Keep moving forward or die.” — Ralph Heath
While success should certainly be celebrated, what can make a company stand out is not just how it how it deals with success but how it deals with failure.
As people and businesses, we are all going to fail sometimes. No person or company is successful at everything, and failure can teach us a great deal.
Innovation most often involves taking a risk; sometimes big, sometimes small. Any risk has a chance of failure, so it stands to reason that fear of failure inhibits risk-taking, which can inhibit innovation.
Tata has a ‘Dare to Try’ award which is awarded to those failures that came through innovation and gave the company some valuable lessons. Proctor and Gamble have a ‘Heroic Failure’ award that honours employees or teams who gained the most insight from a failure.
What is common among these initiatives is that they encourage innovation and risk taking and accept that failures can offer very valuable lessons that then helps the organisation go on to succeed.
Of course, if a company is constantly failing and does not turn those failures into success, it’s not going to last all that long, but a company that is afraid of failure and does not learn from it is rarely going to be a success.
“Failure is success in progress,” Albert Einstein once said.
Encountering our fears and failures prompts the most necessary changes in our lives.
It helps to have wise mentors and hang out with successful people. It is in our best interest to seek the company of inspirational personalities who drive us to become better than our yesterday’s selves.
However, most of us already have everyone we need. Family and our closest friends, they are here to support us. They provide us with the foundation for success, they are our haven.
Without dreams we don’t live, we just survive. They are our connection to the infinite universe. However, we have to acknowledge that no one cares about them. Not even our families and our friends. They will support us, but they’re busy chasing their own dreams.
It is our duty to chase our dreams, no one else’s. We have to grind it out in the trenches.
We are defined by our failures. They shape our characters. But it is important to fail in pursuit of our dreams, not just fail for the sake of failing.
