Fail To Succeed

Winston Churchill once said Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.

I am sure he said this because he understood the eternal struggle every one of us goes through in trying to avoid making mistakes. Evolutionarily, our mind processes mistakes as life-threatening and fatal; therefore, whenever faced with the prospect of making a mistake, we freeze into inaction.

In some situations, being afraid of making mistakes is ok. E.g., In a very volatile market, it is better to be fearful of making a risky investment bet if you are not a proficient investor. This is because a wrong decision could mean losing a substantial part of your savings.

However, in many other situations making mistakes and failing is actually good.

If you want to learn a new skill, do something creative, or solve a problem that seems unsolvable, making a mistake or failing is a critical element of the process to succeed.

Mistakes force us to pay attention to the specific task of determining why we failed- in trying to figure out what went wrong. Mistakes are a way to deeply understand because they can provoke deep thinking. Once you figure out the why, what, and how something went wrong, you are back on track to figuring out the original challenge you started out trying to solve.

It has happened to me many times that when I’m creatively stuck, unsure of what to do, doing something and making a mistake is an excellent catalyst to help me move forward.

We all need to get comfortable with the arc of starting with failure to experience Success eventually. Failure is a powerful enabler for Success!!