Failures are inevitable on the path to success, which means they must happen. As such, we can still learn from our failures so that we do not repeat them in the future.
Moreover, we can equip ourselves with the right skills and tools to make moving on after a failure easy. This way we won’t allow our failures in life to send us into a depressive episode or to hinder us and make us waste months or years questioning ourselves which may cause worse consequences than that failure itself would’ve caused.
What does it mean to fail and what defines a failure?
A failure is an experience of not being able to reach the desired outcome or your goals or being able to achieve them, but only partially. A successful person may know, recognize, admit and acknowledge a failure or mistake they make, before swiftly moving on from it and not allowing it to weigh down on them forever.
“A failure” is too negative of a word, you can choose to consider it and call it; “another opportunity to learn and grow”. If you think of failure as a dead end, you will never be able to move on from it. A failure may not be avoided, but it can be overcome and considered a hardship that didn’t go unnoticed and that contributed to some extent to make you the successful person you’ll become.
No matter how much you expected your life or career to change if only you would’ve succeeded in doing this or that thing, you should not get stuck or fixated on something that didn’t work. That’s because by getting stuck and too fixated on a failure, we lose our chances of succeeding at the next best thing that we could try out next and as soon as we move on.
Why we shouldn’t give up after a failure:
Although you have failed, you would have tried and learned something new. This means that every single time that we fail, we have a higher chance of succeeding the next time that we try. By failing we learn and understand what we did wrong in order to avoid repeating the same mistake the next time that we try.
We often shy away from failure and move on to the next project or something completely different. However, it is important to realize that failure is a part of being a successful person and that it is more than just a bad experience. One must learn from the experience and try again until they succeed, if necessary, instead of giving up and moving to something else quickly.
This doesn’t mean either that we should get stuck on trying to make that one thing that will never work, work for life. If something hasn’t worked out well in one area, it is quite possible that you will have more luck putting your efforts and work into another area or project, after so many tries.
We need to find the right balance and know when to try once more and when to give up. We should learn to move on from failures and test other things when necessary.
If we try different avenues until we see what works best for us, then we may have a chance of getting to success faster, by trying a different path or project. All that matter is not to give up and completely drop it all or let our flame of hope, drive, and ambition die out. Each failure is usually a learning experience that requires us to learn how to handle the situation better in the future.
How to move on after a failure and come back stronger?
1- Try again:
When someone fails at something, there are two ways to move on from it. The first road is to not give up and make another attempt at it. But this is rarely successful the second time we try, because in the same way that we would feel bad about having failed.
We’d get discouraged once we feel bad after a fourth and fifth time of having an unsuccessful attempt. We learn by making mistakes, so learning how to avoid them is also a skill that needs practice and maybe requires failing more than twice, without feeling discouraged about trying again and again.
2- Try something different:
The second way is to make sure that you do not repeat the same mistake twice by trying something else instead. This second option may not be easy and require you to succeed at something maybe the first time you try, which may be difficult unless you discover a skill or hidden talent that you have that makes you exceptionally good at whatever it is you tried.
Success is not a given in anyone’s career or life. It is a process that takes time and practice. When you look at people that are successful, you may envy them or feel bad about yourself or even emphasize your own flaws and failures.
However, keep in mind that you may not have seen on their path to success and how much they worked and failed to get to the top but someone did and if not them, then their ancestors.
3- Understand that success has a simple formula:
Having experience and knowledge on the matter or at least a natural talent will help you with getting to the top faster.
Keep in mind that a failure can also be the result of an error or lack of effort, making it hard to move on when we’re blaming ourselves for having failed. That’s why we should not make any assumptions about how unintelligent or lazy we are for not having succeeded, but quickly figure out what truly stopped us, eliminate it and try again!
When the obstacles between us and success are obvious and not unclear, it is necessary that we gather our strengths, eliminate them and try again. It is important to understand what went wrong before trying the same thing.
Bottom line:
Nowadays, there is a lot of talk about success and everyone seems to want to measure everyone else’s intelligence and hard work by looking at their lifestyles, wealth, and materialistic possessions.
This makes it easy to get caught up in the negativity and to focus on your failures, but we need to be more rational and focus on how to move forward in life rather than what others will think, who’ll judge, and what they will say!
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