Blog Post: The Upside of Down - Why Failure is Good for You

Failing is among life's least pleasant experiences, but nothing else is as essential to success. The opposite of success is not failure, but mediocrity.
 
Napoleon Hill once said: "Failure seems to be nature's plan for preparing us for great responsibilities." Perhaps many of us settle for mediocrity instead when we try to protect ourselves from any kind of failure.
 
In her commencement speech at Harvard, author J.K. Rowling echoes these same sentiments:
 
"You might never fail on the scale that I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - you then fail by default." And she adds, "You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity."
 
Failure isn't something to be despised or ashamed of.  It may feel horrible at the time, but it can actually be good for you. But that's not a message we hear a lot these days.
 
The truth is that some of history's most impressive successes started out as big, fat failures.  Beethoven, Lincoln, Churchill, Einstein ... the list is pretty impressive.  The stories of the world's most successful failures suggest that what matters most is not whether you fail, but how you fail.  Basketball legend Michael Jordan noted that, "I've failed over and over and over again in my life - and that is why I succeed."
 
Research by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck shows that failure, when viewed as a learning experience - in other words, as an opportunity for self-improvement - can build and strengthen new neural pathways in the brain. We can all expand our thinking - and our ability to overcome setbacks - by framing these challenges as an opportunity to learn. When we do this, connections among synapses in our brains become stronger the more the learning is repeated. So failure isn't only a great teacher, it's a great brain-expander.
 
Winston Churchill summed it up this way, "Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts."
 
How to Lose Like a Winner 
 
Every leader should know how to lose. Failure is part of life. Coping with it is critical to personal development. Here are some suggestions:
 

1. Avoid personalizing defeat. When you experience a setback, if you accept defeat and internalize is as a personal failing, you will be defeated. You must accept that, for example, the project did not meet expectations or that your leadership was lacking, but you the person are not a "loser."
2. Analyze what went wrong. Look at the objective facts. Self-analysis that leads to self-awareness is required. Self-analysis that leads to self-pity is to be loathed. Take an active role in your self-discovery process. Write down what you would do differently the next time.
3. Renew yourself. Okay, so things didn't work out as expected. The next step reveals your character. Richard Nixon stated that, "A man is not finished when he's defeated; he's finished when he quits." Admitting defeat and acknowledging circumstances and responsibility lays the foundation for moving forward.
4. Learn everything you can from your failures. A desire to avoid the risk of failure may indicate that you lack the inner fortitude to face adversity head on. Remember that everybody fails. It's part of the process that leads to maturity and success. Most successful people have been through a number of failures in life, but they usually don't think of their failures as defeats. They think of them as lessons.

 
"Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best." - Max Beerbohm
 
References:
- In Praise of Failure by Marisa Taylor - Ode Magazine - October 2008
- How to Lose Like a Winner by John Baldoni - AMA's Leader's Edge - September 2008
 
Jeff Thoren, DVM, ACC is an ICF-certified coach, a member of the ICF-Phoenix Chapter, and the founder of Gifted Leaders, LLC.  Please visit www.giftedleaders.com