Failure comes in many guises and is something that no doubt feels painful at the point of experience. The great benefit in failure is the “new mind,” that it creates within the individual that pushes us forward to new ventures, and new opportunities.
Failure can mean many things, and it is key to understanding the degree of pain and the thresholds you can successfully digest. We all have a given capacity for failure and just like stomach size we each have different tolerances.
So where does success fit in. Essentially it’s a question of appointment dynamics, it’s the number of times we meet with failure. The harder we work the more often we fail. As an example someone engaged in task will fail regularly. We all will get it slightly wrong, we wont get it perfect every time if we work at maximum capacity. This said the working capacity then proceeds to make up for our imperfections through speed, essentially we “out fail,” the outright success.
The more often you can make failure happen the more often you learn and the more often you learn the better your training. Obviously some lessons are bigger than others. A frivolous approach to failure is non desirable. None the less a concerted effort to fail often and hence to move on to the next mind-set is core to success.
This transcends personal life and business. To simplify the point, after any argument. to send the wrong flowers may not get the best response. It will likely get marks for effort. To as a result of sending the wrong flowers however send the chocolates as well and the apology note, will result in better marks than had the flowers been the right colour in the first place.
In sales to meet a new client offers a perfect opportunity for a relationship, essentially you have no baggage whatsoever. The best opportunities however for any sales person is from the relationship, those customers who you have failed with together and whom you have mutually learned from to reach new heights and levels of understanding. Failure even has its hand here.
In work a tradesman who gets the worktop wrong due to poor process will no doubt learn a heavy lesson, and receive criticism, will they not learn to do it better as a matter of process than they had ever done it before.
With failed outcomes comes learning. Learning which is often experienced at a wide number of levels, sometimes failure in these areas happens so regularly over the course of practice that eventually failure happens in the constructs and restrictions of a model built solely in the mind. As our models grow in complexity so hence does our practice. Essentially we call this trait experience.
Failure can be to varying degrees. Just like eating too much at one sitting, failure is something we should do little and often, to many non-co-ordinated mistakes will result in a finality to failure that takes time to recover from. The metaphor could be the sports injury. Push the body hard and it becomes stronger push it to hard and at some point it breaks.
There is no boundary to how much failure can improve the lives of those that do it and those that are round those that fail. Those who fail once see it as harrowing and painful.
Unlike music, sport and other pursuits where we other pursuits few realise that eventually just like music, art our practice and determination to go on makes perfect. We can improve our mind, our direction our strategic thinking simply by experiencing a wide diversity of momentarily painful things.
With great insight on a topic comes great responsibility to inform. Being someone who has failed continuously in the pursuit of perfection over many years I feel privileged to have come out the other side.
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