The Failures We Need

People always focus more on the finish line. Its rewards are the easiest to see. You made it. You got the gold, or you didn’t. All the hard work leading to the moment where the ribbon gets broken is blurred in the celebration. Interestingly, those blurred steps are the essence of the win. Furthermore, it’s not enough to have a lone win. You need to be consistent.?

Any path worth taking requires resilience, and not just momentarily, but day after day, failure after failure. To win any game steps must be strung together consistently. And note that there was no mention of a string of successful steps. There is no such thing.

Win, failure, win—or any other pattern where there are more wins than failures—has a good probability of getting you to the finish line. More importantly, no pause. One continuous movement. Recovery, where the secret lies.

Let’s use an example.

The dancer glides from step to step, effortlessly moving on the stage from end to end, no obstacles can impede. No error perceived, but errors there are. His recovery is sublime. Here is the magic, the detail where the devil lies. To succeed in any art, failure needs to be embraced. Failures, errors, missteps are hard to accept, and even harder to put them on display, but their rewards stem from two aspects: acceptance and objectiveness. Accept your failures and take stock of where you are; face them in order to move forward.

But there’s more. The dancer didn’t glide just because he acknowledged and objectively analyzed his failures, which is an essential initial step. He took the time needed to condition his reaction to them. For him to react instinctively to a misstep, that failure needed to be re-created, and appropriate reactions conditioned. This is worth repeating, a failure needed to be re-created.?

Failures are not an option. Failures shape the path to success.