BENEFITS OF FAILURE

"Success is never ending, failure is never final." - Dr. Robert Schuller

Failure is often the first necessary step toward success. And if we don’t take the risk of failing, we won't get the chance to succeed. When we are trying, we are winning. Many a one has finally succeeded only because he has failed after repeated efforts. If he had never met defeat he would never have known any great victory.  The men who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed.  I am not judged by the number of times I fail, but by the number of times I succeed; and the number of times I succeed is in direct proportion to the number of times I can fail and keep on trying.  The success always has a number of projects planned, to which he looks forward. Any one of them could change the course of his life overnight.  What is defeat? Nothing but education, nothing but the first step to do something better.

We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.  It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures.... Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done.  Would you like me to give you a formula for...success? It's quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure.... You're thinking of failure as the enemy of success.  But it isn't at all...You can be discouraged by failure- or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes.

We could only observe and apply our knowledge with a certain level of understanding and wisdom. From the looks of things, we have always considered the one side of the coin and forgetting that it has only but two sides. Though these faces are quite exclusive, we will always expect to see the face that has a way of favoring us, especially to those who gamble. To this end, we can as well apply this to our daily life that is, seeing life as having two functional faces, which also appear exclusively, knowing full well that one can either fail or succeed. No one is better than the other. Success can be a blessing as well as a curse, depending on what we call success anyway.

Therefore, I present a concept which is outside the box- Benefits of Failure.

I write to put it this way that every failure is a proper blessing because the best part of our life is that which allows us to have a sober reflection, not that part that makes us say such thing as “I have arrived”, “I have made it”, and lots more. I mean that which gets us so comfortable that we desire no alterations. Success, in all ramifications, is a function of failure (I stand to be proven otherwise). More so, failure is the beginning of success and that is to say life without failure has no yard stick, hence, TEKEL (weighed but found wanting). Benefit of failure is a concept derived from the laws of success which states that one has once failed as many times as one has succeeded. Consider the likes of Thomas Edison- the man who invented the incandescent bulb. He failed about 10,000 times before he actualized his invention, Graham Bell- who out of a practice invented the fire alarm, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Ford, even our own Barrack Obama- the current US president. The list will be so much if I continue to mention names.

One tricking thing about failure is not in the failing but in our attitude toward failing. Consider what Thomas Edison said “I did not fail 10,000 times but I only discovered 10,000 ways of how not to do it”. Even the bible acknowledged that the righteous fails seven times yet rises again. We are not in any way exempted from this concept. I say this to say that we should by all means begin to appreciate it when we fall short of expectation. You only failed when you stay down without rising. Actual failure puts us in a euphoria that exhibits a trend of thought that gets us better only if we don’t let it make us bitter. So, allow me to make another submission that failure is a function of understanding that success manifests after one might have failed at doing something.

Funny, one can fail at doing something as well as doing nothing. You see, those who failed only succeeded in doing nothing, and those who succeeded only achieved that at doing something. Life is a function of failure, even success. All failures are of, but, one religion and what that is they never can tell. Failure is seen only in those making progress in life. It tends to appearing during what I call integration time or what a friend calls consolidation. Take for instance, would you stand, raising your right leg as though trying to take a step, holding on for just a minute, then putting the right leg down, ok making it a complete step. Right! You discover that when you stand with your two parallel to each other, you are balanced. But not until the right leg is raised, you tend to stagger, at least for one minute or two which continues even when the right leg is placed further away in front of the left leg. Stability is achieved when the two legs becomes closely parallel again, either forward or backward. This process explains what I call time of integration or consolidation. You can see from this analogy that the propensity to fail in life is a function of making progress, nothing more or less. Show me a man who never failed and I will show you a man who has never succeeded at doing something.

Failure in its true sense is synonymous to making mistakes. According Thomas Chalko, he asks a basic question and made some assertions that will bring us to a very salient point to consider:

Can we avoid making mistakes? Let me answer you with a question:

Can a child learn to walk without ever experiencing falling down?

Making mistakes is essential to the process of learning. We cannot totally avoid mistakes – because by doing so we would eliminate the very mechanism of learning.

However repeating identified mistakes can and should be avoided. Also, we can use our intelligence to observe and learn from the mistakes of others. How do we know what constitutes a mistake? In essence, any action that disregards The Purpose of the Universe is a mistake.

"There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure." - Colin Powell