Failure is a necessary tool in achieving greatness; without failure there is no innovation, discovery of new ideas and possibilities. Unfortunately, a lot of people are unable to pick up tasks that will demand they experience failure and consequently remain comfortable with average and mediocre life. Ask any great or successful person he/she has failed uncountable times to be successful.
- Failure helps a person discover new possibilities
Great things are achieved when we dare to fail; in fact, failure is a key characteristic of great and ambitious people, this leads them to new discoveries and innovations. Unfortunately, lot of people are damn scared to fail, this is because the system has wrongly wired their minds and programmed them to believing that failure means you are dumb and good for nothing. This explains why lot of people are just average thinkers and comfortable in that zone, and sadly, lot of people will have their potentials die in them.
Embracing failure means embracing innovations and self realisation, just as Ken Robinson puts it, ‘If you are not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything’ And Robert F. Kennedy puts it that ‘only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly’’ We can catalogue lots of great people who actually deviated from the traditional norm, went through great deal of failure just to achieve their goal and purpose and eventually leading to some of the great inventions in history that shaped the course of history and made life worth living.
Sad to mention, school is not doing good job in helping young people identify their potentials, but robotically programs everyone to be forced into one box of reasoning and subsequently does not produce critical thinkers but certificate holders.
People like Thomas Edison is recorded to have been told by his teacher that he was too stupid to learn anything, he was also reportedly sacked from his job with the reason that he was ‘non-productive. The question is, why wasn’t he successful in school and job? This is because, these are areas that requires robotic mindset orientations and do not require failure. His quest for unconventionality and innovation made him attempt 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb.
It is also worth to note that embracing failure to succeed is not only limited to technology but whatever a person does, it could be business, sports, music and in fact any endeavor that is purposeful and worth pursuing.
- Failure strengthens the mental-psyche to pick up new challenges
Failure helps a person to be able to embrace the storms of life since it makes the person psychologically, mentally and emotionally strong to accept new tasks.
People who are afraid to fail are weak people; they do not have the bravery and courage to pick up new tasks that can make them achieve anything.
Once a person goes through failure it mentally and psychologically psyches the person to be mentally resilient psychologically and emotionally and tough in enduring failure, necessary for creativity, innovations and achievement.
- Failure makes you smarter
Failure exposes a person to pool of life experiences that makes a person able to understand challenging situations and how to maneuver his/her way out of them. This goes a long way to make the person take intelligent and smart decisions. Unfortunately, school has wrongly programmed people to think that smartness and intelligence is when you get good scores in school, little do they know that their definition of smartness is producing people who in most cases are experts in memorizing ‘chew and pour’’ and forget’-rote learning, and when you are bad at that, you are considered dumb, how unfortunate that reasoning is.
A billionaire by name Jim Koch expressed disappointment that his Harvard MBA contributed less in launching his business. Sam Adams noted that “experience can be a lot more important than intelligence”. In actual fact lots of smart people are those who think outside the conventional school orientation, these people are pioneers of great technological inventions that have shaped the destiny of the world and also produced great successful business people. We can talk of the likes of Henry Ford, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Sarfo Kantanka, etc
- Failure brings out a person’s real value
A person’s real value cannot be discovered until he/she goes through couple of failures. This tests the person’s resilience and frame of purpose. Consider this; mining for gold needs lots of patience, adventurousness and hard work before you can strike gold, same way to bring out your worth and value the element of failure is necessary.
Failure helps a person identify his/her potential, thus the worth of a person is realized. Potentials are like pearls inherently hidden within a person, that in most cases needs to be discovered and going through tasking and failure makes it possible to unearth those potentials.
Conclusion
Every individual has immense potentials that can be tapped and utilized but until one offload out the wrong orientation of “failure is bad” and rather pick up tasking and failing lot of people will remain in the rat race only embracing life of mediocrity and just average thinkers.
