How To Turn Failure Into Success
By: Michael Mints
Tags: Failure, Fear, Mindset, Success, Motivation

How To Turn Failure Into Success

Photo by the blowup on Unsplash

If you’re not failing, you’re not trying.

“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.” — Henry Ford

Few words elicit an emotional response more strongly than the word “failure.” One of the biggest obstacles to success is the fear of failure. In fact, most people are more motivated to avoid failure than they are to achieve success.

Most people don’t even have written goals because of their fear of failure. When you set a goal, you’re deﬁning your success, but you’re also deﬁning failure!

However, failure is a necessary part of your success in life. Failure is a very common result. It’s more common than success. Failure is a short stop along the path to success. There is NO signiﬁcant success in life without a signiﬁcant amount of failure.

Failure is something that should be welcomed. It should be welcomed like a close friend. You should anticipate a fair amount of failure along the way to your success in life. However, not to worry, failure is happening FOR you, not to you!

Understanding the Fear of Failure

“Success is not ﬁnal; failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” — Winston Churchill

So if failure is normal, and the fear of failure is a huge roadblock to success, why are we still afraid of failing?

Fear of failure is one of the most common fears in humans. Unfortunately, though, if you let this fear control your actions, you’re unlikely to experience a lot of success. It might be challenging to conquer this fear, but it’s necessary if you want to reach the highest levels of success in life.

Fear of failure has several components:

Fear of looking incompetent. If you fail, you must not know what you’re doing, right? Wrong, that might be true in some cases, but just because you don’t know exactly what you’re doing at the moment doesn’t mean you’ll not going to ﬁgure it out eventually and start knocking it out of the park. It takes practice to be good at anything.

Think of how long it took you to learn to walk, talk, ride a bike, swing a golf club, or play an instrument. Learning to do all of these things is nothing more than failure after failure until you begin to get it right.

Fear of looking like a failure. Suffering a failure doesn’t make you a failure any more than a baseball player striking out 7 out of 10 times makes him a loser. You may have failed to do something, but that’s not a permanent situation, no a character ﬂaw. A person can’t be a failure; a person can only experience failure.

The Belief that failure is ﬁnal. There aren’t many things in life that only give you one chance. You can always try again. Abraham Lincoln had more failures than most and still became an amazing US president.

Look up his story and see how yours compares. He had failed careers, businesses and lost multiple elections.

Fear of your own limitations. Failure doesn’t reveal your long-term limitations. It might reveal your current limitations, but those can be altered. You can learn and grow as you should from all failure.

Finding out your limitations is good news because you can do something about them and become stronger and more capable than you have ever been.

Fear of success. Maybe you’re not afraid of failing at all. Maybe you’re actually afraid of succeeding. This might sound counterintuitive, but it happens for numerous reasons. Many people believe that people will expect more from you once you're successful, or you won’t have any personal time.

There are a variety of reasons why people fear success.

Ask yourself why you fear success. Is it one of these reasons, or do you have another? Understanding the reasons for your fear is the ﬁrst step to working past it. The mental resistance caused by the fear of success can be enough to bring your efforts to a standstill.

Identifying the Fear of Failure

“There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.“ — Colin Powell

How do you know if you have a fear of failure? Some people like to think they lack motivation or a clear direction. Others fool themselves into thinking that success doesn’t matter to them.

But everyone has things they want to accomplish. Fear of failure might be getting in your way. Can you identify with these actions and thoughts?

You’re not aggressively and enthusiastically pursuing your goals. If you’re not getting up each day and attacking your goals, you might be afraid of failing. Ask yourself what you’re waiting for.

You can’t make up your mind regarding what you want. The inability to choose a goal or a future for yourself is often a symptom of fearing failure. You know what you want; you just don’t have the nerve to claim it yet.

You can’t seem to move past the planning stage. You’re great at making elaborate and impressive plans to achieve your goals, but you never seem to arrive at the starting line. There’s always one more thing you need to do, understand, or ﬁnd.

You suffer resistance whenever you plan to work on your goals. This can be experienced in a variety of ways. A few examples include procrastination, fatigue, headaches, other physical symptoms, a sudden urge to clean the house or mow the lawn, or a sudden surge of self-doubt or anxiety.

Something always seems to come up. If it seems like the world is conspiring against you, it’s all in your head. You’re using random events to rationalize why you're refusing to take action.

If you think in these ways, a fear of failure will likely hold you back from the ﬁne life you deserve. But take heart! You can overcome this fear with upcoming strategies.

Photo by Esteban Lopez on Unsplash

A Healthy View of Failure

“Think like a queen. A queen is not afraid to fail. Failure is another stepping stone to greatness.” — Oprah Winfrey

A healthier and more accurate mindset about failure starts with a different view of failure. If you can view failure in a positive light and as purposeful to your success, your fear will dissipate. You might even learn to like it, to enjoy it, as it's moving you another step closer to your goal, to success!

Think of how drastically your behavior would begin to change if you view failure in a positive light, as a purposeful part of your future success.

Learn to enjoy failure with these strategies, and success will become a certainty:

Fail quickly. Most people spend too much time thinking and planning. The sooner you get started and begin failing, the sooner you’ll receive an education from the world. You’ll also succeed sooner. So get out there, get started, and begin failing as soon as possible.

Avoid identifying with failure. Failing only means that approach didn’t work. It doesn’t mean that YOU are a failure. It’s not a statement about you. There’s no reason to take it personally. It has nothing to do with YOU as a person. If one approach didn’t work, try another.

Failure is the most accurate feedback you’re ever going to get. Your belief on whether or not something will work is just an opinion, a guess. The same can be said regarding the advice and opinions of others. The only 100% accurate answer you’ll ever receive comes from actually trying. The world will tell you if your idea is sound or not.

It’s all just a big game. At the end of each level of a video game, there’s always a difﬁcult challenge or a monster that must be defeated. Life is no different. You don’t fail in a video game and throw yourself on the couch while lamenting that you’re a failure.

Handle your failures in life the way you’d handle failures in a video game. Start over and keep trying until you’ve beaten the monster until you win!

Ask, “So What…”. So, What if I did fail? What gonna happen? Likely, nothing is going to happen at all. Everything in the world is going to continue as it always has.

You are stronger than ANY failure. You might not like the idea of being wrong or of failing, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take it. You’ll be fine; in fact, you’re going to be better and smarter because of it. It may take some practice, but you can learn to get past failure and on to success.

Failure might not be so bad! It’s not hard to see that failure can be viewed positively. It provides accurate feedback on your road to success. You’ll never learn more than you’ll learn from your failures. It has so much to give you if you’re willing to accept it.

Fail quickly and fail often!



Learning to Accept Failure

“You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.” — Johnny Cash

Failure is absolutely the best teacher you’re ever going to have. I can’t emphasize that enough. Not only should failure be accepted as part of your journey to success, but it should be viewed in a positive light. When you understand how much failure has to offer you how purposeful it can be in your life, you will come to view failure as your friend.

These action steps will help you appreciate failure, and all it does for you:

Write down all of the signiﬁcant mistakes you’ve ever made. Keep a failure journal. Whenever you fail, write it down. Start with your earliest memories of failure and work forward. A few examples might include:

○ The times when you played it too safe and regretted it later. ○ When you ignored a gut feeling and then regretted it. ○ When you said something that you later regretted. ○ When you made a faulty assumption without getting all the facts. ○ Perhaps you dated your best friend’s ex and ruined a valuable friendship.

Look for patterns. We are all creatures of habit. Any mistake you’ve survived, you tend to repeat. What are some of the mistakes or failures that you’ve made repeatedly throughout your life?

Ask yourself what you could learn from each of those mistakes. What is the lesson to be learned? What is the moral of the story? Each mistake or failure is a learning opportunity. What could you have learned?

How can you prevent these mistakes from happening in the future? Is being familiar with your past mistakes enough? Maybe it is. Maybe there are steps you need to take to ensure that you don’t repeat your mistakes. Think about each of them and determine the best course of action in the future.

Ask yourself, how great would your life be if you only made each of those mistakes one time. Think about that. How many times have you repeated many of your mistakes?

Consider this, what your life be like if you learned from every mistake you made and never repeated it? That’s the power of failure. It’s the most effective way to learn and enhance your life. So, fail quickly and fail often.

View your actions and decisions as experiments. Think about all the things you say and do. If they don’t work out, just try something else. It’s just a failed experiment. There’s no reason to avoid these harmless experiments.

Experiments are fun and interesting. You’re going to get excited about all that you’re learning from your mistakes, from your failures. How do you feel about failure now? It’s easy to see just how valuable failure will be when you view it from a positive perspective.

Every failure is an amazing opportunity. Change your view of failure, and you’ll be less resistant to failing.

Failing is your friend; it wants to help you grow and succeed faster!