Blog: The 8 ways failure helps you grow

• Failure tells us clearly what doesn’t make sense to continue doing: A couple who are friends with me has a son who is in his mid to late twenties. The young lad is well educated and well mannered but has not held on to a job for more than a year. When I met him he told me about the reasons why he changed three of his jobs and all sounded quite valid. Finally as a parting remark he said “Like my dad says, it is important to be sure about what you do not want to do with life before deciding what you want to do. So it’s better to learn my lessons now and take time to choose a career than feeling frustrated at my decision in my forties” Life offers a lot of options to choose from and it can be overwhelming at times. A failure of a decision or choice tells us clearly which option is not for us and narrows down our options for us.

• Failure makes us creative: We devise alternate plans and strategies to make things work. Our minds go on a creative overdrive thinking up of ways to succeed. Success is great but has a tendency to make us complacent. It is failure that very often propels us to do better, think better and execute better. Einstein said “Insanity is doing something over and over and expecting different results” What failure does is to get us out of that vicious cycle. Our capacity to think laterally, change our approach and seek out of the box ideas is spawned by failures. We realize that there can be many ways to succeed; that it’s not one size fits all.
  
  
• Failure makes us introspect and reset if required: Most of the times we as humans are focused on the outside. It takes extraordinary events to make us look inwards. Failure is one such thing. It makes us evaluate critically our attitude, goals, strengths and weaknesses. It also holds a mirror to our priorities in life and helps us decide if they are right and if they need a relook and reset as well.
  
  
• Failure makes us upgrade ourselves and inspire us and others. Failures are wake up calls and a warning to shirk off complacency. A failure tells us we need to up our ante. It can be about upskilling ourselves in things or learning to do something differently. It makes us better ourselves and inspires ourselves as well as people who look up to us for inspiration. We are forced to explore and seek more. Failure helps us reach for the best version of ourselves.
  
  
• Failure teaches us humility – It is human to fail. It helps us appreciate our successes and what we have with us already. Gratitude for what we have and humility for our achievements keep us grounded. Humility is a character by which we are able to put our egos behind and learn. The focus shifts from ‘who’ to ‘how’. It doesn’t matter who teaches us what we need to learn, it’s about how it’s taught and how well it is learned. Failure and resultant humility broadens our perspective.
  
  
• Failure helps us become journey focused and not outcome focused. When we are outcome focused we become rigid and we are working backwards. A lot of opportunities for learning, acceptance and appreciation are lost when there is extreme focus on how and what your outcome should be. If the definition of success is unrelenting and obstinate, the wonderful things to experience in the course of journey towards it are missed. A failure is an inadvertent break that distracts us to focus on the path and make us ‘smell the roses’ enroute. Failure makes us flexible and pliant.
  
  
• We lose the need to be ‘always right’. This again happens inadvertently. Most arguments and losses are driven by an unquenchable thirst to be right. Attempts to get the last word, the final say or to prove opposition and critics wrong take up an inordinate amount of our time and energy. Once we fail in something, we also realize that something we did wasn’t right and hence we failed. With the renewed vigor and effort to succeed, our compulsive need to be right disappears. We learn to embrace discomfort more willingly with failure. If being successful eventually is important, then there is no choice but to accept failure and understand the futility of the need to be always right.
  
  
• Failure makes us fearless and courageous– It might sound like quite an oxymoron. But fear of failure is only till you fail once. With a failure our confidence takes a big beating. It takes a lot of self work and perhaps determination to try again and again. This steadily builds the confidence back up and instills a sense of fearlessness towards failure.

Write in to us at harish@harishrao.world to be coached and inspired by some of the biggest success stories which sprung out of failures. Sometimes, a bit of inspiration is all we need to make the difference and work harder and smarter!