Wednesday, 19 August 2015

Failing Forward And Golden Mistakes

By Evan Sanders


Fail forward rather than crumble down.

Failure, while grueling at times, is one of our greatest opportunities to grow and elevate ourselves in our pursuit of achieving our goals and dreams.

Nonetheless there is another critical element to the equation of failure that we don't really cover that much. I would like to talk about our mistakes. Making mistakes is an element of life and good lord have I made a lot of mistakes in mine. You say it, I've most likely done it. Fact is, every one of us has made numerous mistakes which are the events that shape our lives. Mistakes and mess ups go hand in hand. Much of the time though, our mistakes are on a much smaller scale. However, they truly are extremely important to our shaping into becoming better. You can learn plenty from succeeding, but you can learn a load more from things that don't work.

Edison learned more about electricity in failing over 1,000 times then he might have in nailing the electric-light bulb in the 1st try. He wouldn't have gone on to be the extraordinary inventor he was if he didn't fail so much. What actually mattered though, was the incontrovertible fact that he didn't let his mistakes paralyze him. He knew, better than anybody, it was all part of the journey and at the end he would be surrounded in light. He ultimately was.

We're going to make mistakes. We're going to snap, push the people away we love, ask for things we presumed we wanted, make rash calls, hurt those close to us, do things that are out of our character, get wasted, say things we don't mean, break promises, break hearts, hate, fear, talk smack, tear things apart, burn things down, the list is unending of the types of mistakes we're going to make in our lives. But when we turn mistakes which can often be fixed into failures, which take lots of superglue and gaffer tape to fix, it is often because we didn't own up to what we have done.

Own it.

This is when we really learn. This is when we grow. It is one of the toughest things to take a look at yourself in the mirror and say "I have done something wrong, and I am going to fix it. I have let myself down." But as hard as that is, our owning up to mistakes is one of the most honest and powerful things we possess.

We should expect better out of ourselves than to cower away by not taking responsibility.

We created the conflicts, now, we should do what is necessary to fix them. Take full ownership. If you have hurt some other person, then it is even more imperative to own up to what you have done and fix it. It doesn't matter how embarrassed you are or how terrified you are, fix it. Probabilities are, if you speak from your heart and you are honest, they will forgive you. You owe them an apology, and most of all, you owe it to yourself to learn from your mistakes and grow.

Honesty is a great foundation to build your life upon.

Have the bravery to act.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment