Failure is Key | Reasons Why NOT to Fear Failure and How Leveraging Failure Is Crucial to Success

Many, if not most people have struggled with the Fear of Failure. So much so that many people willingly limit their capability to achieve more because the fear of failing and not succeeding is so great. This manifests itself in many forms like self-sabotaging behavior: giving up before you've even started, making excusing with the justification that "someone else could do it better", and taking that one time you failed at something, replaying the scene over and over again in your head, and vowing to yourself that you won't ever choose to experience failure again.

The reality is the fear of failure is one of the biggest hindrances to the success you desire to achieve. While you hate failure, you also crave success, but the problem lies in the fact that your failure is your path to that success. CRAZY RIGHT! How could something that feels painful in the moment, maybe comes with some rejection or being misunderstood, be the very thing that leads you to success?

The answer is simple: Failure Is a Better Teacher Than Success

When you fail at something you are very quickly confronted with the understanding of what not to do and why not to do it. Actually going through that experience builds a conviction within you that shapes how you move forward, impacts your future decisions, and leads to future success.

Let's break it down with an experience we can all relate to:

As a child, all of our teachers told us how to do something in order to get a certain result. They told us what we needed to do in order to get an A on a test. We received the knowledge of how to do something in order to succeed and what would get us the results we wanted, which in this case was an A. In reality though, how many of us believed them completely off the start and didn't question if we could do it some other way. Maybe we thought, "I can procrastinate until the night before the test, and then do what my teacher said", or maybe we told ourselves that certain things our teacher said weren't as important as other things they told us to do. When we finally had to take the test, we started to realize we had made a mistake. As we read the questions, panic started to kick in. We didn't know the answers to the questions that were covered in a section we didn't read or we finished the test fully confident we succeeded just to get our results, and to our shock see that we had miserably failed. The point I'm trying to make is that the experience of failing gave us a personal conviction for what not to do and why not to do it.

The knowledge of something tied to an experience gives a person deeper understanding that in turn shapes their path to success. The action of failing ingrains something in our minds that goes far beyond what we can merely comprehend in just learning about the knowledge of something. This experience of failure creates a lasting impact in one's own understanding, that when combined with the numerous other experiences of failure, starts to shape a path towards success.

The reality is you will experience far more failure in life than success. If you choose not to capitalize on what your failure can teach you, you are willfully wasting time and prolonging the success you desire to achieve. If on the other hand you leverage your failure as a tool to teach you, shape you, and build conviction and understanding, you'll then start to accelerate the journey towards success and achieve far greater than you set out to do in the first place.

Highly successful individuals all have something in common: they choose to face far more rejection and failure than the average person, and they leverage it to their advantage.

When they failed the 1st time or the 5th time or the 20th time, they chose to keep trying, to keep going, and to not give up. They leveraged what failure taught them and in the end it paid off in the form of major success. Take Thomas Edison for example. In his response to a question about his mistakes he said "I have not failed 10,000 times—I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.” This is the man who developed devices in the fields of mass communication, improving the telegraph and telephone, sound recording, motion picture camera, and the famous incandescent light bulb. He was a man of great success who will be remembered for generations, yet he faced failure much more than the average person does.

If what you want to achieve is of great measure, then you must resolve that failure is your friend, not your enemy. Failure will be key to your success. It will be your teacher, your guide, a protector, and an indicator of where you're at on your path to success. To fear failure is to make the decision to pursue average and mediocracy, not success.

If you've read this far I don't believe that's you. I believe that you're someone who wants to achieve great things and that you are in pursuit of success. With the end in sight, being that success is that end, count the costs now and resolve that failure is key to the longevity of your success. Resolve to face your fear head on and make failure your friend. If you do that, success will not remain a mere hope but will be a future reality.