failure isn’t forever

“I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.”

— Thomas Edison

The only people who never try new things, who never experiment, who never chart unknown territories, never fail.

It’s your choice — do you want to be a ship tied up in a safe harbor or do you want to explore the vast seas and see what they have to offer?

And if you choose the latter, you must make peace with the fact that you will encounter storms and valleys, and you will experience failure. 

Both life and business are a rollercoaster journey, and failure is inevitable. Instead of fearing failure, you must embrace it and look at it as an opportunity to learn lessons that help you move you forward. As Will Roundtree points out, “Failure is just a price you pay for success.”

It’s like a pendulum. If you want to experience extraordinary success, you have to go through extraordinary failure. If you want to reap bigger rewards, you’ll have to take bigger risks. 

We must learn from the mistakes of ours and others’ in order to advance forward in the success journey. It’s wise to view our life as a series of experiments, where failure is not an end, but just another piece of data to draw important conclusions from that we can use towards refining our strategy. 

So, as you experience failure, just keep pushing through. As you face setbacks and the ensuing disappointment and frustration, stay grounded and make sure that you don’t make failure a part of your identity. There’s a huge difference between “I am going through a failure,” and “I am a failure.”

Nothing lasts forever, not even failure. Don’t let it overpower you, instead capitalize on it and use it as a fuel to come up with creative solutions and massive breakthroughs. Every failure brings with it a few seeds of success, never forget that.