Failure Can Be a Stepping Stone
No path is free of obstacles. Adversity rears at almost every step you take. You choose whether to hold it over your head and let it weigh you down or leave it on the ground and use it as a stepping stone. Failure can be an excellent opportunity for growth.
Having experience with overcoming adversity and learning from your failures will prepare you for success. Don’t let adversity be a weight that crushes you; use it as a stepping stone to rise up.
“Without much experience in overcoming difficulty and capitalizing on failure, nobody will be able to achieve notable success. Let difficulty and adversity be not a weight that crushes you, but a stair to step on.”
-Bernabé Tierno-
Failure is the greatest teacher
Every important lesson comes from failure. It’s how you learn the biggest lessons that life can teach you.
From the moment you tried to take your first step and fell, you’ve learned that falling is inevitable every now and then. But you also learned that you can’t achieve anything if you don’t keep trying.
If you had given up after the first time you fell, you wouldn’t have learned how to walk. What would your life have been like now if you hadn’t learned to walk? Look back and think about all the scars on your body and soul. Which ones have helped you grow? I’m sure many of them have.
Now that you’ve seen it for yourself, you can reframe any obstacle you identify and use it to lift you up. You’ve already done it many times, and you can do it one more. Do it as much as you need to.
Why do you think some people are more successful than others? Is it luck? No. Successful people have failed even more times than most because they kept trying over and over again. They continued to rise above their failures instead of carrying them on their shoulders.
“I’ve missed over 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
-Michael Jordan-
5 valuable lessons you can learn from failure
Failure is inevitable, but you grow slowly but surely as you build staircases out of your mistakes. You can learn powerful lessons from these mistakes, which will make you more mindful of your experiences.
1 – With failure you gain experience
The first important lesson failure teaches us is experience. Experience helps us more deeply understand the dynamism of life. Failure is valuable because it completely changes your biased view and makes you reflect on the true nature of the situation. This allows you to transform and improve so that you can be your best self.
“It is costly wisdom that is bought by experience.”
-Roger Ascham-
2 – With failure you gain knowledge
Failure brings more firsthand knowledge. You don’t understand things as well when somebody explains them to you as when you experience them firsthand. Nothing can replace the knowledge you gain when you learn from your failures.
“Learning is indeed an uncertain adventure which in itself permanently entails the risk of illusion and error.”
3 – Failure teaches resilience
Failure makes you more resilient. In order to achieve success, you have to know your own capacity for recovery. Resilience is helpful in many aspects of life, such as tempering expectations, bearing the responsibility of achieving your goals, putting forth necessary effort, and making necessary sacrifices.
4 – Failure allows you to grow
When you struggle to do something, you grow and mature as a human being. You arrive at a deeper understanding of your life and find answers to why you do the things you do. This pushes you to reflect, put things into perspective, and grow from painful situations.
5 – Failure makes you brave
One of the most important lessons that you can learn from failure is the need to be brave, and to spread the message of bravery. Courage is at the heart of success, and a lack of it leads to defeat.
“I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self.”