Failures are temporary detours, not the dead-end street

By Lionel Wijesiri

“We speak about success all the time. It is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success.” - J.K. Rowling

A struggling writer once had the opportunity of having a brief chat with Thomas John Watson, Snr. the first chairman and CEO of International Business Machines (IBM). After explaining his failure to create a breakthrough in his chosen career, he asked Watson to give him a formula for writing success. “It’s quite simple,” Watson said, “double your rate of failure.”

Watson said, “You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. Failure is a teacher - a harsh one, perhaps but the best. You say you have a desk full of rejected manuscripts! That’s great! Every one of those was rejected for a reason. Have you pulled them to pieces looking for that reason? You can be discouraged by failure - or you can learn from it. You’ve got to put failure to work for you. That is where you find success. On the far side of failure.”

Watson’s message is clear. Defeats and failures happen often in our lives. It may be in our careers or our personal relationships. But we should regard them as inevitable milestones that we hit on the path to accomplishment. The simple truth is – no great success was ever achieved without many failures. It may be one epic failure.

Or a series of failures – such as Edison’s 10,000 attempts to create a light bulb or Dyson’s 5,126 attempts to invent a bag less vacuum cleaner. But, whether we like it or not, as Watson said, failure is a necessary stepping stone to achieving our dreams.

It is unfortunate that as a culture we cannot seem to shake the negativity of the term - failure - even though hundreds of success stories have a shared foundation in some kind of accidental realisation, wrong-footed first attempt, or outright error.

Few hints

The trick to success is to continue pushing after others have given up. It’s those left standing who live the lives of which they always dreamed.

Here are six realities you’re bound to learn along your way to success:

1. It’s harder than it looks. Maybe not from the start, but once you’re in the weeds, you’ll notice that the difficulty is much greater than you imagined. This is because learning a skill or technique is easy. Perfecting it, on the other hand, is much more difficult. Even if you seem to be picking things up rapidly from the get-go, once you’ve been playing the game for a while, things actually get more difficult.

Once you’re in the big leagues, you’re going up against big players - players who most likely have been doing whatever it is that you’re doing for longer than you’ve been doing it. This is when most people hit a wall and decide to give up.

2. You’re not as smart as you think you are. When we see others doing something that we wish we could do, we usually think to ourselves: “I could do that. No problem.” We believe in ourselves and believe that we are capable of great things – and we are. Unfortunately, even geniuses fail. Chances are, you’re no genius. The truth to it is that you have much to learn. There’s always much to learn.

To succeed, you must familiarise yourself with your trade inside and out – get to know every nook and cranny. You may be smart. You may be a genius even. But without the right information, you will fail. Smart isn’t enough.

3. Nobody gets it right the first time. We all hear those stories of overnight successes or those prodigies that seem to manage to get everything right the first time around. It’s not impossible… but it’s extraordinarily unlikely. Besides, making it big once isn’t exactly success. Success isn’t so much an ending to the story, but rather when the real story begins.

To be successful is to win, over and over and over again. Making it big once isn’t enough and most individuals who do make it the first time around (as few in number as they already are) cannot seem to get it right afterward. Is it really success? Or did they just get lucky?

4. It’s not only up to you – your timing also should be right. The truth is that no matter how much you prepare, how much you know, how hard you try, you live in a universe that has a mind of its own. Timing, as many have claimed before, is everything. You can push your entire life, if the window never opens then you’ll only continue to fail. If your window is open and you’re not gunning for the gold then you will likewise fail.

5. Failing absorbs just the same each time you do it. You’d think that after a while you’d be numb from the shocks of your failures and your stresses and worries would begin to roll off your back. Your shortcomings can roll off your back if you allow them to, but that initial blow will always sting.

How could it not? You put your time, your energy, your focus and your heart into your project only to see it face-plant into the ground below. It can be emotionally nerve-racking. The only thing you can do is remember that it’s all part of the process. Remind yourself that you can’t succeed if you don’t fail and hopefully you won’t go nuts in the process.

Failures no longer matter

6. It’s a lot easier to give up than to keep going. At the beginning, you feel energised, excited and ready to take on the world. You train. You push yourself. You’re focused and hungry. But you fail. Then you fail again. And then again. And after that first stretch, that first few months or first year, you’re burnt out. Those who succeed are those who decide not to give up.

You can take a break, take a breather and recoup, but you can never give up. In the beginning, throwing in the towel seems impossible, but after a couple of rounds, it seems like heaven on earth. If you’re not comfortable in hell, then don’t get into the ring.

Failing doesn’t even seem like a possibility, while doing so would be the end of your world. Failure isn’t an option – or so you thought. You can’t imagine yourself failing because you find it to be incredibly frightening. But then you do fail and you learn something. You survived. Your world didn’t end; you’re still breathing. Knowing that you can fail and still keep kicking is incredibly empowering.

Remember, once you succeed, the failures no longer matter. You may fail 99 times, but when you succeed that 100th time, the 99 times prior feel like a dream. These painful and depressing moments of your life get washed over by the bliss that is winning.

Losing may feel like the worst thing in the world, but winning is even more intense. In fact, the more times you fail, the sweeter your eventual victory.

That is exactly what Soichizo Honda, founder of Honda Motors said: “To me success can be achieved only through repeated failure and introspection. In fact, my success represents the one per cent of the work that resulted from the 99 per cent that was called failure.”