“Success is most often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.”

Coco Chanel

Failure does not feel good. In fact, many of us work hard to avoid failure, so we don’t have to experience the negative feelings. Some of us are so good at avoiding failure that we’re not even aware of the effort we’re making to avoid it. We’ve built our lives around safety, structure, comfort, and low-risk activities, to the point where we’re no longer challenging ourselves. 

Let’s be clear. The only way to improve is to risk failure, and the only path to success is improvement. Therefore, in order to be successful we must risk failure. Not only that, we must expect failure. If we’re defining success as being the best we can be (and why sell ourselves short of that), then we’re putting ourselves directly in the path of failure. We will fail, and that’s wonderful. 

Failure is Good

Our natural response is to feel bad when we fail, but it’s critical to change our mindset so failure is interpreted as a positive. Once we do this, our lives are flipped upside down. We look forward to failing. We plan to fail. Any fear associated with failure is gone. But how do we do this? 

The key to redefining failure as a positive is to change the terminology. Failure is a bad word. Growth is a good word. Adopt what is referred to as a growth mindset and then when we “fail” we actually see an opportunity for growth. It’s no longer bad in our mind and we’re no longer talking about failing. We’re learning. 

Thomas Edison once said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” In other words, he failed. He failed a lot. But we don’t think of Thomas Edison as a failure. We think of him as a genius inventor. That’s because he had a growth mindset and learned something each time he found a way that didn’t work. 

Failure is Inevitable

Denis Waitley said, “Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.” In other words, failure is inevitable. As long as we’re talking, doing, and being, we are going to fail, over and over again. Since it’s a fact of life why bother stressing over it? Accept it. Go with it. Prepare for it. 

If we get our minds right and we anticipate failure then we can properly deal with it. How do we deal with it? Again, we use failure to grow. We use failure to improve. To be the best we must constantly improve and the only way to improve is to learn from our failures. 

Failure is a Lack of Success

According to the dictionary, failure is defined as a lack of success. If we’re defining success as a desired outcome of any kind, then failing is falling short of our desired outcome. One reason we might fail over and over again is because we’re setting unrealistic goals. This is tricky territory because we want to dream big and that means having what many would consider unrealistic goals. However, we must have micro-goals to achieve big-time goals. 

Take for example a goal someone might have to be a professional athlete. That person isn’t going to wake up one day without ever practicing a sport and expect to be a pro athlete. No way. That is an unrealistic goal. To be a pro athlete is not in itself an unrealistic goal, especially if someone is young, ready to work extremely hard, and willing to fail. 

The same goes for any goal. Success comes when you’re willing to push through the inevitable lack of success along the way. Many people don’t achieve their goals because they cannot handle the failure it takes to get there. But we must remember that a lack of success ultimately leads to great success if we’re strong enough to push through. 

Failure is Your Friend

Try thinking of failure as your good friend, maybe even your best friend, because it isn’t going away and in order to succeed you need it by your side. All friends bother us at times, but in the end we’re glad to have them. It’s the same with failure. It can be annoying to fail, but in the end it’s the only way to be the best.