6 Reasons why failure is good for you

1. Not being guaranteed success is what makes the achievement so sweet. 

If you were set a challenge and you knew you were going to succeed, the joy of your success, the victory of your winning, would be diminished. I mean it might feel okay, but nothing spectacular. The very chance we might fail is what makes our achievements feel so great when we do succeed. That element of uncertainty. The very possibility of failure. The need for effort. It’s what makes success feel worthwhile. 

 2. Things are supposed to be hard.  

That means sometimes we will fail, but that’s the point. If it was easy everyone would do it. If it was easy we probably wouldn’t care about things so much. We wouldn’t put the required effort it, we wouldn’t set those MEGA goals. We’d just coast and coasting makes for a boring story. 

3. Failure breeds commitment. 

Commitment to the process mixed with hope and uncertainty equals success. If you’re committed, you can move mountains. Sometimes we fail because we don’t fully commit, we half-heartedly give 87%. 

When we fail because we weren’t committed, we soon learn what matters to us, we learn what we care about and what can be left. Sometimes failure can indicate we weren’t really that bothered or it can refocus our efforts.

4. Failure teaches us things we wouldn’t ever have learnt unless we failed. 

Failure is tacit knowledge. It is the very act of learning by doing.  Sometimes you have to do it first and fail. And that is simply the best way to learn.

5. Failure teaches us humility. 

It teaches us resilience. When we fail, we become stronger in who we are because we faced a fear and we still survived. We need resilience. If we can be average, if we can learn and fail at something long enough to then become good at it, we win. We start to change our lives, one small failure after another.

6. The periphery of failure is where new adventures lie. 

The fringes of failure often taste bittersweet. So close yet so far. But on these broken edges, the parts where you dip your toes in – that is where new adventures lie. That’s where the new stories will start. You’ve got to reach out to the edges, to push the boundaries of what’s possible, to then learn where success lives and sometimes we push the boundaries too far.