FAIL FORWARD

“If you're doing your best, you won't have any time to worry about failure.  ~Quoted in P.S. I Love You, compiled by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.”

Success is not achieved without passing the stage of failures. The success of a person depends on how a person overview a failure and how does he react on it.

Just recently, I read a book of John Maxwell that talk about how to react positively on failures that comes into our life. The title of this book is “Failing Forward”. It teaches how to be a friend of failures. These are the important things I have learned upon reading the book.

1.)  We cannot avoid failures to come our way. Learn to accept that everybody will go through some mistakes in their life. What we can do is to turn failures into positive ways by learning the new definition of failure. Failure won’t actually kill you. Be familiar with failure.

2.) Remove yourself from failure. It means that don’t always blame yourself upon making mistakes but never blame others either. What I mean is failing on some things doesn’t mean you are a failure. William D. Brown said that “Failure is an event and not a person.”

3.) Find an exit way out of failure. Make failure a teacher of yourself. Learning from your mistakes will help you find the exit way out of failure. It’s not good to be stuck in failures.

4.) Take the responsibility or the consequences of your failures. Face your fears of failure. Escaping away from responsibilities and consequences will just make you face more failure.

5.) Change your bad habit. If you know that your habit keeps you from achieving your goals, get rid of it. The unwillingness to change is one of the reasons why people are keeping on committing mistakes. It is hard to break a habit but how you will break it will depend on how big is the courage you will put on yourself. Yes, you can control courage.

6.) Don’t be a tyrant of your past. Many people don’t move on because of the things they hold on from the past. The wrong things they made from the past seem to be a foothold on them. There is a saying that for you to kill the whole tree, pull off its root. If your past is the root of your failure, pull it off. Say goodbye to yesterday.

7.) Be a best friend of failure. Don’t be afraid of failures. If you learn to embrace failure in an open way, then you will become a best friend of failure. Don’t take failure as an enemy. In that way, you will embrace failure in a positive way.

 

Always remember that success will always depend on you. Failure will also depend on how you look at it. Keep on failing forward.

Notice the difference between what happens when a man says to himself, "I have failed three times," and what happens when he says, "I am a failure."  ~S.I. Hayakawa