You Must Fail!

I know you must be taken aback by the topic of this post to the extent that it has pushed you to want to see what I am talking about here. Yes I repeat it, “You must fail.”

I must confess that when I first came across a statement of this manner sometime ago, I was not in agreement with it. “How can he write such a thing”, I retorted to myself. “With all my positive thinking and preparation, I just could not fail”, I continued. But how wrong a perception I had as I have now out- grown that.

With all the successful people around, one can just easily assume that they just went from one victory to another victory over challenges. The experience from the study of successful people, mostly from their biographies and auto- biographies show that they moved from one failure to another failure until they finally found success.

For example, the life of one of the world’s most renowned leaders, America’s President Abraham Lincoln’s was described as a biography of failure; one the World’s most remembered inventors, America’s Thomas Edison experienced what may be tagged as The World’s Most Persistent Failure when he went on to invent the light bulb. That’s just but the few I want to put down here for now. Think through this story:

A high school commencement speaker was the president of a large corporation. He was actually chosen for the occasion because of his success. Yet his speech came with a most unusual wish for the graduates. The speaker told the students sitting before him in their graduation gowns, “if I could have one hope for you as you go out into the world, it would be this: I hope you fail. I hope you fail at something very important to you.” He went on to say how his own early life had been one failure after another, until he learned to see failure as an effective teacher.

That’s just the point I want to make. Many people out there don’t just want to think about failure. They see failure as a God- forsaken monster that they should have nothing, absolutely nothing to do with. Some according to certain doctrinal teachings don’t even believe such a word should exist.

Most people will always want to run to the place of success while treating the place of failure with disdain. One thing they don’t realize is that on the road to success, one must pass through the den of failure. Someone said that whenever you fall down (fail), pick something up (learn a lesson).

I was listening to a successful entrepreneur being interviewed on TV and when asked what his message was for up- coming entrepreneurs, he said, “know it that you must fail at one point in time or the other.” It was really a hard one for me to chew let alone swallow but it was really a truth of a message.

Failure is good I always tell people when ever I speak formally at seminars or during coaching sessions I give to people. Embrace failure, learn everything you can from it; pick out why you failed and what should have been done to prevent such failure; what were those things that shouldn’t have been done that contributed to your failure and on the whole find a positive from the negative. What do I mean by that? In every failure, find a success.

A popular football coach Vince Lombardi always told his teams, “if you cant stand failing, then you will never be able to understand the true meaning of success.” How about that?