Failure is Just a Step Along the Way

No one likes failure. No one sets out to fail. Even when you fearfully anticipate failure, you still try your best to avoid it. But failure, to some degree, is inevitable. Nobody can do everything perfectly every time. Even the most successful people have and will experience failure.

Highly successful author and speaker Seth Godin shared this piece of wisdom on his blog:

“Just about anything worth doing is worth doing better, which means, of course, that (at least at first) there will be failure. That’s not a problem (in the long run), it’s merely a step along the way.”

If you’re not willing to try, if you’re not willing to risk failure, how will you ever succeed? You can’t succeed unless you try, and you can’t improve unless you’ve experienced some degree of failure.

As Godin said, if it’s worth doing it’s worth doing better. There’s no “getting better” if you haven’t first experienced “not good enough.” So allow yourself the opportunity to experience failure and “not good enough.” Then strive to do better next time!

Accept the fact that failure is just a step along the way, and welcome that step, because you have to move past it in order to reach the next one.

When have you experienced failure as a step along the way? What kind of success did you find on the other side?