Sunday Newscape Magazine

It is hard to imagine the words failure and success going hand and hand, but it’s true. Unfortunately, the stigma associated with failure often stifles a person’s mindset, thus killing their dreams. Success comes only after failure gets you there.

The point is, in order to achieve success you will fail many times along the way. The secret is what you learn from that failure so it doesn’t happen again. What most don’t realize is perseverance is great, but will not help until you figure out why you’ve failed in the first place. As a result, the majority quit pursuing their dreams because of their unwillingness to change their approach when failure occurs.

For example, as we all learned to ride bikes growing up, the motto was practice makes perfect. This sounds simple; but if you think about it, if we continued to ride the way we first learned the outcome would have been a lot more bloody knees. Perseverance was not the solution, but it was the adjustments we made in order to get it right. In essence, we changed our approach ever so slightly, and got the results we wanted. Life works the same way.

Don’t get me wrong on the word perseverance. Everyone should give it all they’ve got when trying to accomplish something. Most believe that if they fail they should just jump back in and try again without analyzing why it did not work in the first place. Unfortunately, this process is misleading and will likely have devastating results.

To counteract failure is to just step back, see if you need to modify your approach, change what needs to be changed and you will see results. Keep using this process because it may take many different approaches to achieve your desired result.

Throughout my life failure has come in many ways. Growing up, I had no leadership to guide me and I failed time and time again. One thing I did know was what my outcome would be. In other words, I knew what I wanted to pursue at the time, but I did not realize that if I made just a few adjustments my outcome would have come sooner. This is why people use the term “school of hard knocks” when describing how they became successful.

This time of turmoil is a great example of the “school of hard knocks.” The staggering rate of bankruptcies, foreclosures, and job loss have crippled this country. What this indicates is that we must step back and use this as a lesson so it will not happen again.  As a nation we will come back stronger than ever because we’ve learned from our mistakes.

If you encounter failure in the future just think of the bike lesson. With an open mind, a little bit of patience and positive thinking failure does lead to success.