Embracing failure

The other day a friend told me that she was afraid of failing in her relationship with her new partner. So I started thinking about failure and success.

I would define success as the status of having achieved a goal or an objective. It’s the result of a long way or process that includes failure, changes, time, learnings, and patience. I found an article about this topic on Forbes. I totally agree with the idea of failing our ways to success. Failure is something we should embrace and not be afraid of.

Just like the idea of progress, success has always been something we must achieve without tripping on stones, something lineal and onwards. That’s the manner our parents and grandparents were taught to do.

Nowadays I believe that the idea of success has changed but just a little bit. As it happened with other things in life (for example, what harassment means or the inclusion of rights for certain minority groups), what success signifies or how to succeed is something that the new generations are learning to think about and reconsider.

Embracing failure

Changing our mindset to embrace failure

As the new generations are reconsidering it, I think the idea of success has changed but could still change even more. Most people I know want to be successful and are still afraid of failure. Maybe because humans tend to avoid changes and look for some kind of stability. So, if we fail, that means we need to recalculate, change and accept that we can’t manage every aspect of life as we would like to and need to be prepared to deal with uncertainty. Maybe because we grew up learning what our parents taught us. In order to break that mindset we need more time and to open our eyes, ears, and minds to realize that things could be seen with a different approach.

However, and happily, there are more and more people speaking out loud about seeing failure as a natural part of the process and not something detrimental which we have to dread or avoid like the plague.

I think failure contributes to a person’s success. Every experience we live shapes us. We should take every failure, loss, gain, or accomplishment as part of life, not as something negative or positive. Instead of considering actions as positive or negative, we could start by thinking about how our past experiences make us grow and help us achieve our next goal. Or even, how they can change our goals and point of view.

As the article above mentioned says, in order to succeed we aim to embrace failure. We need to be ready to fail, go back, iterate and try again. As we say in Spanish, “el camino se hace al andar”.

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