Failure Is A Friend Often Misunderstood
Sochiro Honda, the founder of Honda once said, “Success is 99% failure.”
Sure it feels terrible when you have to deal with it, but how can we accept failure as the integral part of success that it actually is?
1. NOBODY THAT EVER BUILT ANYTHING GRAND DID IT WITHOUT SOME FAILURE.
Most of us have heard the story about how J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter book series was created out of “rock bottom” and rejected by several publishers before going on to become immensely successful as one of the greatest children’s books of all time.
The author had this to say during a commencement speech she gave at Harvard University:
“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.”
Walt Disney, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs and Jerry Seinfield all started out as failures in one way or another, but ended up being hugely successful.
So the question is, why should you let failure stop you, when it’s been demonstrated time and time again that it isn’t really the end of the road?
2. FAILURE IS AN OPPORTUNITY TO REDIRECT AND CORRECT COURSE.
Oprah Winfrey, “The Queen of Media,” once said:
“It doesn’t matter how far you might rise. At some point, you are bound to stumble. If you’re constantly pushing yourself higher and higher, the law of averages predicts that you will at some point fall. And when you do, I want you to remember this: There is no such thing as failure. Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction.”
Oprah started out as an evening news reporter but soon lost that job, which pushed her into trying her luck as a Talk Show host. The rest, as they say, is history.
3. SOMETIMES FAILURE GIVES BIRTH TO A NEW INVENTION.
Potato chips, coca cola, champagne, chewing gum and chocolate chip cookies.
All products that were invented by mistake.
Next time you’re facing failure, remind yourself that it helped to make the world a lot more delicious!
Admittedly, you will not always be able to eat your mistakes, but imagine how much further you could go if you treated all your failures with a childlike curiosity and tried to understand them and learn from them, instead of dismissing the results altogether and fixating on what wasn’t achieved?
Your big break could be just one little mistake away. You never know!
Sources:
J. K. Rowling Website: https://www.jkrowling.com/harvard-commencement-address/
The Harvard Gazette: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/05/winfreys-commencement-address/
