If All Else Fails

By Byron Pulsifer, © 2009

You need to be able to move forward in life without carrying a huge amount of baggage. One of the greatest obstacles to getting what you want is to remember past failures as if they foretell the future.

Far too many people assume, and assume wrongly, that failure in the past means failure in the future. They seem to adopt the attitude that they have tried and failed so there is absolutely no reasonable requirement to ever try again. They think that trying again can only set them up for more failure, for more disappointment, and for more ridicule by their friends.

And, there is something that is even more interesting when failure arises. Failure doesn't mean that you sit down and never throw in another attempt because throwing in the towel only means that you quit for this time not for all time.

There is, after all, no light without knowing darkness, and therefore, there is no success without first failure. Excess baggage of failure in the past means that you haven't properly processed what has gone before and turned this baggage into a positive. The natural question, at this point, is to say how can failure be a positive? Let me put this positive turning of baggage another way.

Take a failure as a crucial part of growth; as a crucial part of learning; and as a valuable chapter full of a host of learning tools. Failure properly dissected with 'learning from mistakes' as its focus will resurrect the positive aspects of the attempt and highlight what to change on the next attempt.

When all else fails, revisit failure as your best teacher, your master of learning, and put aside forever any notion that failure means quitting. The old adage rings true in that 'quitters never win, and winners never quit'. Nothing worth having, doing, or accomplishing comes pre-packaged with foolproof steps that guarantee success.