The title of this post aside, no matter how many times we may hear about growing from our mistakes, if we’re being honest with ourselves, no one really likes to fail. In business, the heartache of failure can be compounded by the loss of significant sums of money, the inability to further employ your workers, and in general, letting down your loyal customers or the public or both.
But, if you find yourself smarting from a near catastrophic mistake, you’ll have a lot to benefit from pausing a bit along the way instead of putting all your energies into bouncing back. The more comfortable you are with the mistake and the more you’ll be able to gain from it because…
Failure is the best motivator. Difficulty makes a person push harder. When we feel squeezed, we are in effect pushed out of our comfort zone, and we may feel all the more motivated to produce, to accomplish, to inspire, and to be even better than we were before we fell. Another side benefit to this is that the harder we work, the more passionate we may become about what we are doing. Consider this quote from Mark Cuban: Don’t follow your passion; follow your effort.
Failure is the best sifter. It puts all distractions into the background and leaves us to focus on what is truly important. If we were caught up in the feverish pace of doing business, then it stops us in our tracks and forces us to re-examine and re-evaluate our goals and our actions. Once the things that are the most important are in front of us, it pays to take note because…
Failure is the best teacher. A somewhat sad truism is that we can often be so caught up in the daily rat race that we don’t even see where things are off, and we only wake up when a big mistake slaps us in the face. But, at least at that uncomfortable moment, we are actually the most receptive to change. If you can realize this and really look at the factors that brought about the failure you can end up learning some very powerful lessons.
In short, failure and mistakes happen, and when they do, you’ll have a lot to gain by sitting down with them and embracing them, instead of trying to run away.