How Successful People Deal With Failure
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm
– Winston Spencer Churchill
Failure is the one word a lot of us hate to hear. It’s a contagious plague that we all want to avoid at all cost because when you are such a perennial failure, everybody wants to keep you at arm’s length, and so we work frantically hard to keep it at bay. But sometimes in spite of our noblest intentions, failure comes knocking every so often. Why are we so cursed? We wonder.
Why can’t our many dreams just come true without having to feel the sting of defeat? The questions never end as the answers we seek elude us continuously. But as it is with most things in life, sometimes a little change of perspective is all that is needed to open up new vistas of understanding ‘cos some of the things we were taught about failure was downright wrong.
Now imagine for a sec what would have happened if Edison had given up after failing 1000 times to come up with the light bulb? There would probably be no light bulb, right? What if Abe Lincoln had given up after the many political defeats he had suffered before becoming president in 1860? The world would never have known the legendary American president who courageously stirred the ship as America navigated the stormy waters of civil war.
We draw inspiration from these men today because they did not give up even after failing again and again. Failure is simply a state of not accomplishing the desired goal or an intended objective. Therefore it is only a temporary setback, and we must not allow ourselves to retreat into catatonic numbness when we are faced with the grim prospect of foundering.
In fact, failure is another opportunity to begin more intelligently what we failed to accomplish before. There are certain things we might have missed out the first time we carried out such a task or set out to achieve an avowed objective. It follows then that if you want to succeed, you must first learn to embrace failure because it is the stepping stone to success.
The great Stephen King-renowned novelist and celeb author had his first novel Carrie rejected 30 times before it was eventually published. Who would have thought that this genius of a man had once experienced failure in the form of rejection at some point in time in his life? King actually threw the manuscript of the novel Carrie into the garbage which was later retrieved by his wife, who believed that her husband was going to become a published author someday.
Somehow, they stayed the course and the rest, as they say, is history. Stephen King is today a best-selling author of books that have sold in the region of 350 million books! Not so bad for a guy whose first story was rejected thirty record times. Failure is what it is: a significant ingredient for lasting success.