My Failure at Failing

You’ve heard of Max Lucado? Considered one of the best writers of our times, he's got this amazing writing style where his prose flows like poetry. Beautiful.

Yet here is one striking fact about Max Lucado: as great as he is, nobody wanted to publish his first book. Do you think he gave up? Obviously, no. But he had to send his manuscript to fifteen publishers before one finally said yes.

John Maxwell, the famous leadership expert, asked him if he felt discouraged and ever considered giving up. Here is what Max Lucado replied: "No. Every time I got the manuscript back, I thought: Well, I’ll just try another publisher”.

Good thing somebody said yes before he ran out of publishers. J

Thumbs up for Lucado. This is what Maxwell calls: the ability fail. I wish I could say I’m good at it, but I’m not. Why? Maybe because nobody likes to fail, me including, and even less people want to admit it. We are geared towards success and we want to tell everyone about our successes. We want people to know us for our successes, don’t we?

Look on Facebook, Instagram or other social media venues. Everyone posts exciting vacation trips, happy family pictures, romantic moments, best shots. Nobody knows that on that trip they had the worst fight and most of the time they were bored; that that family is on the brink of divorce; that although smiling that apparently successful man is in deep depression, about to lose his job, or considering suicide. Many cringe inside, comparing their deepest feeling of misery to others’ most exciting moments, while still hitting like. 

Comparison. The biggest enemy of self-image. The birthplace of a failure mentality, for that matter. But is failure such a bad thing after all?

I’m learning that failure is not failure unless you fail to get up and try again. This is how unsuccessful people think. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit. After all, if life is a journey it is ok to hit potholes and bumps, to run out of gas, to get lost, but quitting gets one nowhere.

I’m learning that every successful person has failed many times and that there is value in failure. The founder of Honda Motors said: “Many people dream of success. To me success can be achieved only through repeated failure and introspection. In fact, success only represents 1 percent of your work that results from 90 percent of that which is called failure.”

I’m also learning that there is a difference in failing and seeing yourself as a failure. “I have failed” is different than “I’m a failure.” Somebody said that making mistakes is like breathing. But if you regard yourself as a failure you will never be successful, or hope for an improvement, because you’ve made failure your identity.

I’m learning that although many people will measure my success according to how often I have failed, or didn’t succeed, it’s been estimated that most successes failed an average of seven times before they succeed. So, it’s ok. Even if I’m only one step better than last time, I’m making progress.

So, depending on your attitude toward it, failure can make you sink to the bottom or help you along the journey. And a lesson to learn is how to fail forward. 

To do that, I thought to adopt a different attitude when encountering failure, inspired from smarter people, like J. Maxwell:

1.  Not to take it personally – I've messed up. No doubt. I’ll do better next time.
2.  Let it be a learning experience & use it to grow – unwillingness to be stopped by failure & willingness to learn from failure.
3. Not to give up, regardless of what other say – failure comes easily to everyone, but the price of success is perseverance.
4. Let failure redirect my life – it’s just an adjustment, it’s not that I’m bad or wrong. But if the passion is still burning in my heart, the right thing to do is to keep going.
5. Keep a sense of humor – it’s easy to laugh when everything is going great, but it’s important to laugh when everything is going wrong. I love this quote.

There are always possibilities out there. If not, we have the capacity to create them. Look around, everything was created by humans, just like us. Surely, there is a door somewhere. Seek and you’ll find. Knock and it will be open onto you. Even, if sometimes we have to take detours. And when you really want it, someone said that the whole universe will join in to help. I call it the hand of God.

p.s. To the point -  watch and be encouraged.