Failure: The Key To Success

Hi Friends! 

Here is my article in the last Pacific Showcase! 

Failure: The Key To Success

What is it that you fear? Some people are afraid of spiders, other people are afraid of heights. I am afraid of sharks. My finance Jordan, is afraid of birds. Even though we may have different personal fears, at one point in our life we have all been afraid to fail.

Failure can be tough, it can be heart breaking, it can even seem down right unfair at times. But one thing failure is not, is useless. Failure is in my mind, the greatest teaching tool of all time. Learning to fail is the key to success in life. The secret to overcoming your fear of failure, is to change your negative perspective of failure to a positive one.

To better your perspective, lets examine some of the greatest success stories in history.

Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor because "he lacked imagination and had no good ideas." He went bankrupt several times before he built Disneyland. In fact, the proposed park was rejected by the city of Anaheim on the grounds that it would only attract riffraff. Now if you google Walt Disney, you will find pages and pages of his accomplishments, not to mention creating the biggest entertainment empire of all time.

Let’s us take a look at Thomas Edison. Edison’s teachers said he was, "too stupid to learn anything." He was then fired from his first two jobs for being, "non-productive." To then go on to have 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb, before finally succeeding at attempt number 1,001! He went on to be the greatest inventor to have ever lived, still to this day leading the record for the most United States inventor patents 1,093. The most any one person in the United States has ever obtained!

Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. Most people in his shoes would have given up. Took the rejection as a defeat. Not Michael, he rose above the failure to become arguably the greatest basketball player of all time.

I bet if we could ask any one of these guys what their key to success was, they would tell us, “learning from each one of our failures. That it is impossible to be perfect and that failure is not something to be feared, but merely stepping stones up the long corridor to our goals and dreams.”

I know that we have all heard a lot of these success stories and said, “but that was them, there's no way I will be able to do that.” Well I'm here to rival those negative thoughts and throw you another proposition. Why not you? Why can't you be the next great success story? What if you had the tools to train your mind to love failure and crave it?

There are a few simple tools I can give you to overcome the fear of failure.

The first is to simply practice positive affirmations. Positive affirmations are just phrases you tell yourself in the present tense that help your mind focus on what you want to be true. What we believe to be true becomes our reality. Here are a couple I use quite frequently, “I am thankful for my failures, for they take me one step closer to my goals,” or “I embrace failure and am made stronger by it.” It may seem weird at first to say these to yourself, but trust me once you get past the weirdness, you will start to see major changes. Repeat these affirmations several times a day, for at least 30 days. You can even write them out and stick them on your mirror, or wherever you know you will look throughout the day.

Another way to overcome failure is to realize that what we ourselves view as failures, are simply just curve balls thrown at us to learn and grow from. Once you understand this concept, life gets a lot easier. When you become grateful for your failures and realize you are given every challenge, setback, and failure to become a stronger, better, and a wiser person, you will have the mindset to achieve anything.

I want to leave you with one of my favorite quotes by Michael Jordan, "I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

With Love, 

Whitney