Make it okay to Fail

The quality of your life is not determined by the quality of your positive experiences but the quality of your negative experiences.

Make it okay to fail, the only way to succeed in everything you do is to face the challenges head on and walk right through them. When you are working on something unusual, almost everyone will tell you quite frankly that you will fail, many will laugh around, you will certainly face disappointments and rejections. But some of life’s greatest lessons come from the things that are challenging. You're more likely to succeed if you've failed than if you've never tried. Failure is not a mark of shame; it is a mark of victory envisioned in future.

As you walk towards your dreams, you are going to fail at some moments, you will encounter some challenges, you will make some mistakes, and sometimes you will be ignorant enough not to know your next step. You could lose half of your money trying to implement that business idea. Your property could go up in flames, and your family could disown you. Like it or not, believe it or not, during this process of going for your dreams, stuff will happen that will discourage you, there will come a time when quit looks to be the only logical option, there comes a time when failure becomes undef-eatable, it’s not optional, it will happen. But here is what I have to say, if you are so scared of failing, no one will ever do it for you. There is no real doing without you being the first. It's better to fail doing it than not to do it at all. Most people can’t do it in life simply because they cannot risk failing, and in the process, they do not try anything only to realize at their death beds that they never tried anything and so they are dying with their dreams looking at them, of course with large angry eyes. What a painful experience! There is nothing as painful as an untold story lying in the grave.

In the quest for success, everyone makes mistakes; even the most successful people on the planet have to fail several times before we come to know of them, not once, not twice, but severally. Behind every visible success story are hundreds of invisible unsuccessful trials. In her book “Becoming,” Michelle Obama describes a series of events that happened after Obama’s historic DNC key note speech in 2004;

“The media response to Barack’s speech was hyperbolic. ‘I have just seen the first black president,’ Chris Mathews declared to his fellow commentators on NBC. A front-page headline in the Chicago Tribune the next day read simply, “The Phenom.” Barack’s cell phone began to ring nonstop. Cable pundits were dubbing him a “rock star” and an “overnight success,” as if he hadn’t spent years working up to that moment on stage, as if the speech had created him instead of the other way round!”

The lesson, embedded in every failure is an incredible beauty because in every mistake is a puzzle that you can use to reduce your future mistakes. Life is about challenging yourself, stretching every other day to create new meaning for your own self. Doing your best is more important than being the best, and every great accomplishment began with a willingness to try. I like the words of one writer who said, “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly until you get it right”. It is okay to do things right but until you know how do them perfectly, be willing to make them as bad as you can try. Remember, practice is the beginning of improvement and it creates a road to near perfection – with every attempted try comes an improvement. To Winston Churchill, courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm! Keep Going, fail your way to Success.