Fail Quickly and Often
Failure, the word and the emotion attached to the word, can keep us in fear and block the sunlight from our life. It can stop us from taking risks, reaching out and moving forward. Since childhood we’d each had our own definition of failure. Where you punished if you failed? Did you see yourself as a loser when you failed? In looking at the word, what I see is f-ail and it’s the ail that is getting my attention. If something is ailing, why would we take it personally? It doesn’t mean we, (our person, our self-esteem or self-worth) are bad; it means something is ailing. Is it a misread market, a undeveloped skill, not enough practice? It could be any one of a dozen things. So in failing, you get busy using what you learned from that particular failure to buff up in the area that was ailing. You’re one step closer to success.
Thomas Edison failed over 10,000 times before he succeeded. When asked how he felt about his failures, he said, I haven’t failed, I learned 10,000 ways how not to make a light bulb.
What if you knew you had to fail ten times before you’d get it right, before you’d succeed. Wouldn’t you be excited to get started? The sooner you fail, the sooner you succeed. Think about it.
