3 Ways to Turn Failure into Success
Though “nobody’s perfect,” no one likes to fail. So much so that they don’t want to experience or even talk about it. But that’s unrealistic, because even the best fail at one point or another. The failure may have been due to human error or a stroke of bad luck. Whatever the cause, you will fail.
Given the inevitability of failure, we should try to turn our disasters The fact is, it’s possible to turn failure into an opportunity for greater success.
Learn From Your Mistakes
Probably the most important part of turning failure into an opportunity is to learn from your mistakes. When you fail, take the time to analyze what—not who—went wrong, and come up with ways to limit or even eliminate the chance it will happen again. Or you can do nothing and continue doing the same wrong things. Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
It’s easy to change the way you work to prevent careless mistakes from happening, while the best you can do for a failure caused by unfortunate circumstances (emergency, bad weather) is to set up contingencies. Which brings me to my next point.
Keep Murphy’s Law in Mind
Since life is difficult and not everything goes your way all the time,it’s best to plan for the worst. After analyzing the cause of your failure and learning from it, the next step is to plan your projects while keeping aware that there’s a chance you’ll fail.
Examples include maintaining regular backups of your current projects and your Inventory 2.0, or creating multiple studies in case your initial proposal is rejected by a client. Once your plans start making accomodations for failure, you’ll find that mistakes don’t come as often, which means you can concentrate more on getting the job done and work faster.
Share the Wealth
Now that you’ve learned how to minimize the chance of a particular failure, share your newfound expertise with others. In other words, tell others how to avoid your mistakes. A great way to do this is to guide your audience through your own experience, as well as the lessons learned from them.
Presenting yourself as someone who has the answer to a particular kind of failure can raise your profile and add to the impression that you’re an expert in your field.
All the three ways discussed above have one thing in common: a positive outlook. The only way we can turn failure into our advantage is to always see the glass as half-full.
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POSTED IN: Living as a Freelancer, Ways to Work Faster
1 opinion for 3 Ways to Turn Failure into Success
Afolalu Julius
Jul 1, 2008 at 3:55 am
The sting in failure consists not so much in the act of failing itself but the ostracism from society as though it’s criminal to fail even for once. The major challenge is overcoming the societal gravitational downward pul and ascend to high up. Rico, you have told me how to do just that in a brief but full of content article. Thanks.l
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