When giving your best isn’t good enough

In our culture we celebrate success and mock failure. This is a tragic mistake because there is more to be learned from failure than there is to be learned from success. One of the greatest things you can learn from failing is that sometimes your best wasn’t good enough.

Failure is a kind of success

The world is full of judgments. People expressing unkindness towards one and another for the sake of personal gamesmanship. We praise those that have made it and isolate and ridicule those that didn’t. Have a successful life means a lot of failure. Most of the time your best won’t be good enough. If your best was good enough every time then you must be God. Or you are just really lucky. I have an Uncle like that. He always seems to land on his feet. Failure, in his case, is just the next step to success. People that think this way, embrace failure, endure defeat because they have gained the knowledge they need to win next time round.

If at first you fail, fail again

A person who knows the power of failure knows the power of success. You may not realise it but you are a failure. That’s the best thing you can be. When you fail, you learned something. A man I admire once told me about a failure I had in business, ‘how much did it cost you?’ I thought about it. It had cost me a lot of money. I told him the amount and he said, ‘That’s not that expensive is it? It’s just how much it cost you to learn what not to do.’ Of course, you can be perfect. But where’s the fun in that? Fail, for it you don’t you just haven’t taken enough risks yet.

Learning why your best wasn’t good enough

The key to extracting lessons from failure is what I would call an ‘action learning’ methodology or what educators call the plan-do-reflect cycle. When you have a plan, you do it, if it fails you collect the lessons and start again. Here is a visual map of the cycle in action:

People who fail love this cycle.  Why?  Well if you know that life is a learning process you won’t be afraid to try something because it might fail.  You probably will fail at some point but it’s what you learn that makes you better for the next adventure.

To be successful requires an attitude that is always looking to learn and grow.  A failure to do either results in what I call true failure: to do nothing and complain about everything.  It’s so easy to sit and point the crooked finger at those trying new ideas.  When they invariably succeed we love cutting people down.  Ask yourself this question: what did they learn that enabled them do that?  The answer might surprise you.

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