Nuggets of Wisdom #7
Contrary to what your society, community, loved ones or even your subconscious might be telling you, failure is essential to growing and progressing in life. There can be no growth without failing. There can be no moving forward without failing a few times, often miserably. However, failing doesn't mean staying there or allowing that to delay your progress. Notice how toddlers get up and fall back down again? Do you think they stay there until they can walk perfectly or do they try again and again and again? We can learn a lot from toddlers when it comes to failure, slow progress and the commitment to move forward despite the setbacks.
Most of us fear failure because we believe it will define us; that we will be known by them. This is the wrong mindset because it prevents us from moving forward and learning from our failures. We can prepare ourselves better every time we fail. In other words, we have to try to make our last failure our best lesson. It allows us to evaluate ourselves, the steps we took and to rethink the whole process so that next time we are closer to our goals. More importantly, failure should be regarded as an event or a series of events that happened as a result of a chain of wrong and right decisions, and not a reflection of our competence, or lack of it. This is what today's nugget of wisdom is about; a reminder that we are not our failures, and our failures are not us.
Thank you for another fabulous, nugget. This is something I only recently started coming to terms with and literally nobody had ever told me it was OK to fail at stuff as long as I learned from it. Yet fear of failure can be crippling to success itself. There needs to be a balance, so your reminder is very important.
Thanks, I appreciate the kind words. I am glad you now have come to terms with this. For many people and cultures, failure is a taboo. And it's a real shame that children and young people are not encouraged to view failure as a stepping stone to success.
No growth without failure. :) Great post!
Exactly! Thanks :)
So true. This I always tell my language students who are so afraid of making mistakes. If you as a teacher can ad some fun everything becomes more easy for them.
That's a great approach to teaching a language! I do that too and I remind them that making mistakes is part of the learning process and no one becomes fluent otherwise.