It’s hard to get ahead in life unless you’re comfortable with the possibility of failure. Talk about a word with a negative connotation. It conjures up a horrible scenario with dire life plan consequences.
But is it realistic?
I got laid off from a job during a horrible economic downturn in the late 80’s. I’d spoken up about an injustice and got a nice kick out the door as a reward instead of the pat on the back I thought I’d get. I felt like a giant failure and grew terrified that I’d never get another job. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t eat.
Do you know that I got another job in less than three weeks? The boss at this new position had no problem that I’d been laid off. She was looking for someone just like me! Someone who would speak up.
If I hadn’t “failed” at the first job, I might not have realized that different businesses look for different characteristics in their employees.
Failure teaches us lots of valuable lessons. The big one being that it’s o.k. to take a chance on yourself, whatever the outcome. That without taking chances, you can’t find out what you’re made of.
If you look at the histories of some successful people, you’ll see that most of them came back from the brink several times, that “success” was anything but an easy, straight road.
Society developed the concept of failure to keep people dependent, to keep them thinking very small, to keep them from taking action. It’s easier to control us when we’re all running around scared.
The best advice we could give the next generation would be to go out and try to fail! If that were the goal, imagine how brave and bold business owners and life owners would be?
What would you attempt if you had no fear of failure?
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