Can You Achieve Success Through Failure?

• You have a world of information at your fingertips. So use it!
• When failure happens, you have only yourself to blame.
• Listen to the message failure tells you, and learn from it!

Someone once asked me if I could imagine what life would be like without the Internet. I paused, thought about it for a moment, then realised how much the Internet and all the technology we have available to us is taken for granted. 

For example, 60 years ago people were lucky to even have a TV. And if they did, it was black and white with maybe 1 or 2 channels!

That conversation made me realise just how lucky we are to be living in the times we are in. I mean, basically we can have virtually anything we want. But going back to the Internet, for me, the Internet symbolises knowledge and freedom.

A World At Our Fingertips

We can now communicate with people from all over the world, and have a wealth of information at our fingertips, literally.

All we have to do is press a few keys, move our wrist slightly and click a button with one finger. That’s hardly what you’d call manual labour!

Yet with that small amount of effort, we can access a world of information and learn just about anything we want. So why aren’t we all geniuses?

I mean, in theory we have all the information anyone could ever need to make them a success. So why isn’t everyone successful? Or more specifically, why do so many people fail to achieve success?

Well personally I think that one of the biggest factors that are responsible for failure is ourselves. Yep, we have only ourselves to blame. Of course, most people don’t like to look at it this way.

Whose Fault Is It Anyway?

If something goes really well then people love to take all the credit, and then attribute it to their wondrous skill and talent.

But when things go wrong, oh no, it wasn’t their fault. Noooo, it was someone else’s fault. Or it was because something didn’t go quite as planned (which again wasn’t their fault).

In other words, most people have an attitude that failure was nothing to do with them. It’s either someone else’s fault, or some cosmic conspiracy that was out to get them.

The trouble with this attitude is that all people fail at some point in their lives. It’s very unlikely you will try something and succeed the very first time.

Face it, that’s life. Why it’s like that? I don’t know. But what I do know is that failure makes us stronger, but (and it’s a big but) only if we accept the true cause for that failure, and are willing to learn from it.

The Tap On The Shoulder

Failure often comes to remind us of something we need to improve or change in our lives. It’s like someone coming up and tapping you on the shoulder and saying “excuse me, you might want to try doing this differently”.

If you listen to the message that failure tells you, you can learn from it and make sure you don’t make the same mistake again.

But if failure taps you on the shoulder and you angrily turn around and say “bugger off!” then you won’t know what failure was trying to tell you.

Most likely you will then repeat the same mistake and failure will come tapping on your shoulder again.

So do yourself a favour. The next time you fail at something, be grateful for that tap on the shoulder, and being willing to listen to the message it wants to tell you.

All people fail in life, and what separates the winners from the losers is not the amount of failure they experience. But the willingness to listen to that failure, acknowledge the cause and then learn from it, so next time things are done differently.