Along our travels, we will undoubtedly run into a variety of people. Among them will be people at various places and opposing sides on the teetering scale of success. Some people will exude success as if it were a glimmering coat of armor. Others will seem lost and simply working on challenges that would seem minuscule by comparison. And the rest may fall somewhere in between.
It can be said of the more successful people among us that our failures are many, and our victories are few. And this is not because we are failures. This is rather because our motivation for success greatly outweighs our worry of failure.
And never could this be more profound than when realized as an end result of many years of successes. Because for each successful venture, we’ll know that the many attempts that we made to achieve it has taught us how to do things better.
Growing only happens when we make mistakes. And the more we take risks at attaining our goals and dreams, the more opportunities there are for wins and losses. So it should logically follow that the most successful of us are those who have tried and failed the most (the operative word being “tried”). Unfortunately, though, this is not the mentality that most of us attach to our failures.
On the contrary, the stigma is that once we’ve failed, we are failures – we’re useless. Most of us feel terribly defeated when we’ve tried for something and not seen it come to fruition. We get down on ourselves and become unambitious as a result.
But if we look back over the process of finding success in our lives, it is not the success that teaches us our strengths. If anything, success not borne by hard work generally leaves us weaker and less capable of handling the challenges that our failures would have easily taught us about.
It is important to set goals. But it is just as important that we see them through to completion. And at first our paths will be riddled with wrong turns, missteps and miscalculations. But once we realize that these hurdles are teaching us how not to go about achieving our aims, we will quickly get the footing of what we should be doing to succeed.
This process, if continued, will undoubtedly find us winning battle after battle and learning lesson after lesson about our ever-expanding capacity for greatness. And it all starts with failing.