Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Fail Your Way to Success!

I'm intrigued by all kinds of writing, especially books and articles that can help one make a positive impact on the world.

I'm especially intrigued when people attempt to write about something as ephemeral as creativity and what drives it.

There's a great quote in a little book I picked up recently:

"Fail, fail again. Fail better."
- Samuel Beckett

Trying and failing, I'm convinced, can be a key to success. To innovation. To making an impact on the world.

It's all in the way you process the experience of failure. What you learn from it.

It's lessons learned and all that, sure. But it's really the behavioral changes that we make after failing that really serve us well.

We might be tempted to wallow, to spend too much time licking our wounds, healing from the embarrassment of failure.

But by using that experience as fuel to propel oneself forward, armed with this highly personal, highly useful new information gleaned from the failure itself, one can triumph over having faced the challenge and emerged.

There is always something to be gleaned. We just need to pay attention to what it is.

When's the last time you failed spectacularly at something? What did you learn?

No comments: