Principle 48: Learn from Failure

They teach you more than success

When you were in school, did you notice how easy life seemed for the most popular kids? The football captain, the cheerleaders? Did you later notice how some of them had so-so adulthoods? Why might that be?

Did you also notice the geeky kids in school, the ones who seemed so awkward, but got good grades? Notice how many of them became millionaires in the tech economy?

This is not a geek-triumph story, I just use them as types of what I mean by how we get more out of failure than we do with success. If you achieve success on your first attempt at something, here’s what often happens:

• You keep repeating that success

• You don’t try anything else

• When society moves on, you are left there succeeding at something people stopped caring about

When you fail on your first attempt, here’s what often happens:

• You lick your wounds

• You think about what you did wrong

• You try a new approach

Trying a new approach is called growth. Doing the same thing over and over is called stagnation. So don’t be too discouraged by failure. Sure, you’d rather succeed, but you can think of failure as step one of an eventual better success:

Success block is built on a foundation of failures. You kept at it, failure step by failure step, trying new things, until you finally succeeded.

Why is that more valuable than instant success? You created a path of learning. The instant expert didn’t learn anything, but you learned how to improve and grow. That’s a very useful skill in an ever-changing world.

When you find yourself on the floor from failure, as the classic song says: “Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.”