Fail Forward: Your Success Depends on Your Willingness to Fail
“Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up”
You cannot want to change your life and fear failure. These two things just do not work together since change means that you have to alter, replace or modify someone or something. In other words, you need to try something new.
This can be a terrifying thought since today’s society spends a large amount of time scrolling social media and the carefully curated posts that are presented on it. A lot of the content that we consume makes things look easy and it might make you feel as though life needs to be perfect or it’s not worth posting. This can lead us to believe that failure is not normal and that making a mistake makes us less worthy of a person.
If you believe that you need to be perfect in everything you do, finding success and creating change in your life is going to be very difficult, if not impossible.
Every failure we experience comes with an important lesson. That lesson will become the key to your success, if you learn how to celebrate them instead of fearing them. This realization is why I adopted the Fail Forward mantra and mindset – Failure is only a failure if you ignore the lesson and give up on what you were working toward.
We all fail at one point or another in life, it is a key aspect of learning. However, we get to choose if we stay down or if we get up, brush ourselves off, and fail forward in order to reach our goals.
Failure can actually become a great driver toward success because failure is one of the best teachers we have. It can help you to:
Identify habits that need to change.
Identify your strengths.
Confront your fears.
Make you more resilient.
Open your eyes to new opportunities.
Build your confidence through problem solving.
Help you to get clear on what you truly want in life.
These are just a few examples of how you can leverage and reframe a failure in order to grow as a person and move your life forward. The most important thing to remember is that you have to fail before you can succeed. You need to be a student before you can be a teacher and you have to be willing to Fail Forward in order to achieve the success you desire in life.
Many famous people who we admire today failed before they became successful:
Oprah Winfrey
J.K. Rowling
Thomas Edison
Henry Ford
Walt Disney
These are all people who had a dream and the tenacity to go after that dream, despite repeatedly failing, and having people tell them that they were no good at what they were trying to achieve. They didn’t have a fairytale journey while pursuing their dreams. They weren’t perfect, and they didn’t have all of the answers as they set out to make their dream a reality. They failed forward until they figured it out.
Imagine how different our world would be if Edison gave up on the light bulb, or if Walt Disney didn’t pursue his dreams and build Disneyland. What about a world without Ford Motors?
We all have dreams and we all have fear. If we can learn anything from the list of people above, it's that if you want to succeed, you need to embrace failure and be willing to learn from your mistakes. You can't give up on your dream, no matter what others say or think. You need to believe in your goal, as well as yourself, enough that you stop being afraid of failure and embrace it instead.
Leveraging failure might seem overwhelming if you’ve never done it, but it doesn’t have to be. Before you begin to implement change, take some time to:
Do your research to educate yourself.
Identify challenges that you might encounter.
Design a strategy (and remember it can be altered as you learn more).
Find a mentor (don’t be afraid to ask questions and learn from others).
Celebrate the small wins (not only the big ones).
Take time to self-reflect.
You need to realize that if you are going to be successful in life, you need to embrace the suck. You need to become a student again and allow yourself to be okay with not having it all figured out already. You need to realize that it takes time to master new things so that you can blaze a new path. This timeline will vary depending on what you are doing, but no matter how long it takes, it will be worth it. You will gain knowledge and confidence and that is so much better than any comfort zone you may have been afraid to step out of.
As I write this and self-reflect on my own experience with Fail Forward, I am so happy that I dusted myself off time and time again. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have lost over 100 pounds and kept it off for over a decade. I wouldn’t have been able to re-lose some of that weight when life got difficult and I fell back into bad habits. I wouldn’t have started a blog, or a podcast, or became a coach/mentor to so many people. I wouldn’t have made the hard decisions that completely turned my life upside down and forced me to figure things out from scratch. I most likely wouldn’t have packed up my life and moved to the west coast after only knowing what east coast life was for over 4 decades. If I didn’t achieve all of that, I most certainly wouldn’t be writing this post for you to read today. I am grateful to every failure that I encountered, because it taught me something about myself and it allowed me to learn a new way of looking at life.
So today, I ask you to think about your dreams. Envision what your life would be like if you succeeded at making this dream a reality. Now pick something small that you can do today, that you will succeed at, so that you can build up your confidence to take that next step forward. I want you to stop living life small. I want you to stop selling yourself short and comparing yourself to what you see on social media every day. I want you to challenge yourself. I want you to try new things and fail at them. I want you to learn lessons and find out what works for you, instead of doing what works for everyone else. I want you to Fail Forward, because I guarantee you that while it will be challenging to do so, it will be way more rewarding than looking back on life and wondering “what if…..”
