Failing Successfully
Have you ever wanted something so badly that you could almost taste it? You put your time, effort, and energy into creating it, achieving it. You sacrifice for it, and in return you expect an amazing result. The ideal clients clamoring to sign up for your new product or program, editors urgent to buy the rights to your book, the perfect ‘couldn’t fail even if it tried’ resume - outstanding success by any and all definitions. But instead of awesome success, your efforts fall flat!
Total. Absolute. Failure!
You are greeted by silence when you expected to hear the sounds of success. No praising emails. No clients clamoring to sign up. No editor pushing 6 figure contracts on you. No awesome job offers. You stare in disbelief that no one recognized the brilliance in what you wrote, or photographed, or created! Surely it wasn’t you….it had to be them!!
We live in a culture that has very little tolerance for failure – of any kind and to any degree. We are taught to expect to be brilliant. First time. Every time. Straight out of the gate. What we fail to recognize in our failures is what amazingly, powerful teachers these failures of ours can be.
Every failure provides us with at least one very valuable lesson.
Thomas Edison, one of the greatest inventors of all times, once said “Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.”