People always talk about failing successfully, but what does that even mean?
If you’re not failing, you’re not taking enough risk.
Learn from your mistakes (failures count, too, I’m sure).
Celebrate your failures, because failing at something shows that you really tried at something.
All those thoughts are nice and good, but what do they actually look like in real life? How is it actually applied—practically speaking?
Are we supposed to just make a bunch of stupid decisions and say that we’re better people because of it?
Or intentionally invest our money in unwise ways, lose all of it, and then pat ourselves on the back in a sickeningly self-congratulatory kind of way?
Nay, friends. Nay.
Unless you’re some freak of nature who’s never done anything wrong in your entire life, then most likely you won’t need to go out and intentionally do some catastrophically stupid thing in order to find something lesson-worthy.
Just pick something in your life that’s a little bit of a fail, and learn from it.
One of the ways best ways, in my opinion, is to document what you did, what didn’t work, what you learned, and what you’ll do differently next time.
The last part is a key ingredient that gets skipped over frequently, I think. We all talk about “learning” stuff, but if we can’t identify actionable ways of doing something differently next time, we’re not actually learning anything at all and are bound to do the same exact thing if presented with a similar situation.
I say this because that’s what I’ve done the majority of my life, and it’s never really worked out exceptionally well for me.
Therefore, the act of identifying the alternative to the actions that resulted in the failure is crucial. Even if you don’t know for sure whether or not something will actually work better, you’re at least setting yourself up with a different option to try. Compared to just doing the same exact thing over again, it’s at least worth a shot!
Lastly, if you can frame what you learned in a way that could be applicable and helpful to someone else, it’s a double whammy for good! You’re not only helping yourself grow, but hopefully someone else at the same time!
So, in an effort to maintain transparency and actually practice what I preach, tomorrow I’ll discuss what I learned from my most recent failure: submitting my work late—failing to meet a deadline—and reaping the consequences (and life lessons, but mostly consequences).