Failure and Achievement

Are you afraid to fail? Who loves it? Who wouldn’t like to achieve something perfectly and with zero failures? But that isn’t the way life works. There is a connection between failure and achievement. In fact, I would say you can’t have one without the other.

Nobody has it all figured out at the beginning. No matter how much we plan, it is impossible to account for every possible failure or outcome. C. S. Lewis says it best with this quote.

“Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.”

C. S. Lewis

A few years back, I was on a project that involved the edition of a book. This book had great sales and we were going to update the design and illustrations.

As we were planning for the release, I heard a phrase that made me cringe; “Failure is not an option!” As the comment echoed in the room, I thought, “Well then, we are in serious trouble, because that doesn’t allow for any improvement.”

Failure is Always an Option

If anything is going to change, failure is always an option. Failure and achievement go hand in hand. Sure, we can plan and strive to avoid obvious mistakes.

Failure is success if we learn from it. But even then, we have to be careful. What didn’t work before could work today, and vice versa.

• Technology may have improved
• Customer preferences may have changed
• The timing may have just been off before
• What we thought was the root cause of a past failure wasn’t really the problem

As we get older, we can be tempted to turn down ideas that didn’t work yesterday but could be wildly successful today. Failure is an option if you want success. We have to face those fears!

Doing Nothing is a Bad Option

Sure, we can choose to do nothing. It is an option if we fear failure. And it is a choice. Staying put is a choice that guarantees no failure, nor success. But it is also is a choice that leads to regret.

It is better to encounter short-term failure because we tried than long-term failure because we were afraid of the possibilities. While doing nothing is an option, I hope you decide to take the risk, learning from failure, and succeeding is far better than wondering if you could have been successful.