10 Ways Failure Helps You

Failure is something everyone fears at some point in their life. That's why I decided to talk about it in my last article called Failure: The Stepping Stone To Success. I've talked about a few of the reasons why we fear failure and how we are preconditioned for this fear by our environment and circumstances. I've also presented stories of famous failures, people who failed thousands of times before becoming successful and inspiring millions of people with their work.

Now it's time to see how can failure help YOU evolve, why should you embrace it and even go after it.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION?

Alright. Let's start then...

1. Builds character

By going through failure you build a certain set of traits that help you a lot when it comes to guiding yourself through life. Failure pushes you beyond boundaries and beyond all the falsehood in your life.

You no longer accept what life is giving you and instead, you start taking full responsibility in order to live your dream life. You get to that moment where enough is enough and you no longer tolerate all the misery happening in your life. Failure also establishes good moral values. Moral values that help you grow even in the toughest time.

2. Builds discipline

Discipline is a very important thing when it comes to achieving goals because it supports you in doing the tasks you have to do even when you don't feel like it.

Now, you may wonder how does failure build discipline?

Easy...

When you go from failure to failure and you've just had enough of it, you simply realize via the hard way that you can only get over the unwanted outcomes in your life by being disciplined and actually doing the things you said you're going to do no matter how you feel in that moment.

Simply put, failure forces you to get into action and be consistent with the work needed to reach your goals.

3. You find out what doesn't work

Here come the optimists of the world. These people see the glass half-full even if the other half looks like it's empty. For them, that half is full too.

It is full of opportunities to start over, opportunities to learn and opportunities to improve.

By failing you learn that the method or the tactic you used isn't efficient or effective and that you may have to change the way you approach the goals you've set.

4. Helps you overcome fear

Once you fail at something, you now know what to expect when trying the same thing the second time. You can plan a little better the way you approach the obstacle that stopped you before and you also realize that you have nothing to lose if you fail again.

Failure also helps you overcome the fear of trying new things, starting a new project or taking a job you're not familiar with but you know that if you start doing it consistently you will get good at it even if at first it's going to be a little messy.

5. Experience

You see, experience is what gives you wisdom and the best way to get experience is by failing. How is that, you may wonder.

Well, when you fail, you learn a lot of things about you.

You get to know you better and what you are made of.

You understand situations and people different than you were before.

These are some examples of what I call experience and only by doing that you become wiser, you make better decisions and handle hardships better.

6. It makes you a more valuable mentor

A lot of us have that desire to inspire and motivate people to be the best version of themselves. That's a really awesome thing to do in this modern society and for that, I take my hat off to you!

But, to be able to do that we first have to get through our hardships, our failures and for our sure winning moments so we can have a better understanding, more experience and enough skills to share the valuable information we accumulated until that moment.

7. Emotional management

Handling emotions is a big part of becoming successful so it is really important to develop this trait as much as possible.

What I mean by saying to handle emotions?

I'm talking about that moment when you get frustrated or angry because you don't get the results you want despite putting in the work and making sacrifices.

I'm also talking about that moment when you achieve one of your goals or you make progress and you are so happy that you decide there is no reason to keep working hard anymore.

You may ask yourself what role does failure play in this situation.

Well, in the same way it builds discipline, you are somehow forced to understand that despite unwanted results, in order to reach your goals you need to keep going and look for other ways of reaching your destination.

At the same time, it teaches you that you can't just stop and take it easy once you made a little progress or even a big progress because now you need to maintain what you've accomplished and even go higher than, which usually takes more effort than before.

Now, I'm not saying don't enjoy that moment or don't celebrate it. I'm just trying to say that if you're not careful with your effort after that success, you have a big chance of going back where you started.

8. Encourages problem-solving

This is kind of easy to understand.

Wherever you fail at something that you really want to do, you will immediately look for another way of doing it, another way of approaching that obstacle or problem standing in your way.

As a result, you become more skillful in identifying what the problem is and what moves can you make next to get closer to your goal.

9. Develops perseverance and resilience

Perseverance and resilience, two extremely important factors when it comes to achieving goals and success. Without them, no man on this planet would be successful.

You know why?

Because without them we would give up after our first failure and we would never try again...

But if you ask the most successful people on the planet or you study them you will find out that all of them failed at least once before succeeding and by saying once I'm being really nice.

If you don't believe that I suggest you again to look at my latest work about failure.

Now, how does failure build perseverance and resilience?

To that, I will answer like this...

Whenever you want something with all your heart, failure doesn't hurt you that much, but it motivates you, even more, to work harder for that thing that you want.

You become immune to that pain of failure because you realize it's just an obstacle in your way and that is meant to teach you something that is required for being successful.

When you learn how to cope with these skills than you're way ahead of everyone that lets every failure dig deep down in their heart.

I want to end this part with two of Winston Churchill's sayings about success, which sound like this:

"Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm."
"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts."

10. Helps you realize that is alright to ask for help

There are people who think they can do the work required all by themselves and they never reach out for other people to help them. They create their workout plan. their nutrition plan, do the projects, make the calls, go shopping, etc.

In other words, these are the "expert at everything" kind of people. In reality, they only spend a lot of time on tasks that devour energy and just distract them from the more productive things available, the ones that help them get a living, put food on the table or make them fulfilled.

Don't get me wrong.

I'm not saying working out is a total waste of time, or that studying nutrition or other domains is useless.

I'm saying that maybe instead of you trying to read and learn everything about those things why not get a coach who can help you with all of this.

It takes out a lot of pressure off your shoulder when you know there is someone who knows how the body works and what is necessary in order to reach your goals.

This way you don't have to spend hours studying the best workout plan for fat loss or building muscle, what nutrition plan to follow in order to have energy or other things like that.

You just go to the gym, follow the instructions of your coach and once you're done with that you have more freedom, energy and time to do the other tasks you've planned for that day or that week.

But what if you don't have the money to hire a personal trainer?

In this case, my recommendation is to at least look for some friends that have more knowledge than you about these topics or search for well-known and trustful persons that have a lot of experience and results on that domain and then ask them whatever you think will help you get closer to your goals. Most of the times you'll get an answer.

But as soon as you are able to hire a coach, do that without hesitation because it will help you become more productive, more practical and also learn a lot more in the process.

Now that we found out how failure can put you on the right path to success, you may be tempted to go do that thing you fear the most because you know that even if you fail today, tomorrow you will be on the mountain top.

HOLD ON FOR A MINUTE!

All the benefits of failure I've listed above become practical and really helpful when you have an open and positive mindset.

If you let failure touch your emotional side and you respond to it with anger, frustration or despair, then you set yourself for more failure in the future.

But if you have that victor mentality and you see failure as an actual opportunity to learn and grow, then every hardship and obstacle you encounter becomes your wingman on the journey to accomplishment.

It's all about perspective and speaking of that, I have one last question for you...

WHAT IS YOUR PERSPECTIVE?