“We don’t learn much when everything goes right. We learn most when things go wrong.”
As we close out the calendar year, it is normal and natural to look back on our successes over the past year, and our failures. There is nothing wrong with looking at our failures, so long as we don’t dwell on them. History is rife with stories of people who have failed forward to success. The Wright brothers failed initially, as did Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Walt Disney, Abraham Lincoln, Michael Jordan, Steve Jobs – the list could go on and on. The key to each of these ultimate success stories is they all learned valuable lessons from their initial failures and put those lessons into practice to reach their eventual success.
During his lifetime, whenever I called The Colonel to admit to failure and talk it out, his initial question was always the same, “So, what have you learned, kid?” He never asked what I’d done wrong, but he always asked what I had learned. “Failure is only tragic,” he said, “if you don’t learn anything from it. If there is growth that comes from it, then we can live with it and move on.”
Failure is a vital part of the growth process. Without it, any solution could be counted as a triumph, when there might have been a better, more successful alternative if you had simply failed a few times along the way. Whether it is in sports, industry, science, or art, the true giants in their field know that things go right more consistently if we learn from the times when things go wrong.
So, as you reflect on the past year, and look forward to the next one – what have you learned? How will you take the lesson to make next year a success?
Read Lauren’s Whitepaper on The Nine Essentials of Significant Leadership.