Failure is Your Best Weapon

If you want to succeed, you have to be willing to fail – and to fail a lot! If we don’t fail we never stretch out of our comfort zones or take risks. With each missed step we learn things along the way that help us make better choices and achieve greater success in the future.

I work with a lot of job searching students and clients who feel the initial sting of a job they didn’t land as a personal failure. I encourage them to reflect on the process and to pull the positive out of the situation and learn from it. Often they admit that their interview preparation was not up to snuff. When they spend the time to polish their interview technique to showcase their strengths, they always perform better for the next interview opportunity.

Countless people I have coached shared stories about jobs from which they were fired. Most people can look back now and see the lessons learned from those experiences that have helped them grow and move forward. While failure can be painful at the time, we must learn to re-purpose the experience to take away what was positive and edifying so we don’t make the same mistakes again.

According to Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management and founder of the non-profit Chief Executive Leadership Institute:

“Failure punctuates truly great leaders. They aren’t great until they’ve failed. Failure is the crucible, the test. They deal with it, and their confidence and capabilities are enhanced.”

With each failure you can create a new purpose. Look at Martha Stewart who was motivated by her comeback. She focused on defining herself by her future and not by getting sucked into the frenzy of people who wanted to bring her down. People who fail should feel liberated to start again, they have a great opportunity to clean the slate and start over. And showcasing your resiliency can be very significant for future endeavors.

We can all look to the world of sports as an example of learning to be good losers. If you fail at something, you have to look for ways to succeed while having a positive attitude. If someone beats you in a competition, you should shake her hand and offer congratulations. Taking the time to discover how the experience can empower you the next time around is a valuable failure lesson.

In the wise words of Colin Powell:  “There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.”