Failure IS an option

Every success story, every from rags to riches story seems to start in the same place, failure.  They all seem to begin with the “hero”, whoever that might be, starting from nothing and gaining everything.  One might even argue that the true impact of the story comes from the dirt floor, living in their car, dire straits beginning.  After all, how impactful or meaningful would these stories be if the success came from a slightly less successful career? 

When I was younger my mother always told me that life wasn’t about the hard falls I would frequently encounter, but it was how quickly I got up.  Granted, this analogy was used mostly because I was a fairly uncoordinated child who grew into a slightly more coordinated adult, and falling was usually the reality she had to work with.  Even so, this provided me with the perfect framework for how to view failure.

To be truly successful in life and business, failure is a major contributor to ultimate success.  What successful man or women comes to mind whose success was not framed by failure?  In our culture failure has been painted as anti-success. Without failure how can we expect to learn, or evolve in any way?  We shouldn’t view failure as the end but instead see it as a pathway to something new and exciting. 

The idea of failure is a simple one.  It is defined loosely as “un-success”.  There are times where our failures will warp our views of what success might have been.  In other words, if what I think should have happened (what we see as success) does not in fact happen, that is failure.  Instead why not see “what we think should happen” as the ideal outcome, and not the only outcome?  Preparing our vision of success for the possibility of failure is the very thing that could push us to great things.  Thomas Edison once said, “I didn’t fail the test, I just found 10,000 ways to do it wrong.”  In other words we should not expect failure, but be prepared for the idea of things not quite turning out as we think they should. 

In business and in life failure is not the opposite of success as defined above, but instead it is merely having limited vision for the future.  If we let failure be defined as society defines it, then we will be scared of it, therefore never failing “successfully”.  Life equals Risk.  Failure is not only an option, but sometimes in order to truly succeed, it is the only option.  After all, according to Henry Ford, “Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”

-Grant Mankin