A natural reaction to failure can be to pull back and not try again. Having been negatively affected by failure, it’s easy to feel we’re doing the right thing when we try to help others or our children avoid failure and not end up in difficult situations.
The moment I fail, I know I’m at the point of a breakthrough in learning. It’s the point where the new me emerges.
– Robert Kiyosaki
Author of Rich Dad Poor Dad
My 8 years old daughter walked up to me with her iPad in her hand, looking a little down. She had accidentally changed a setting and was locked out of being able make changes to the apps she had installed. She is a naturally curious person and in all her exploring on the iPad she had set a restricting password and forgot it.
The only solution was to reset the iPad. It was a lot of work for me and was I feeling pretty sour about it. I even made some comments aimed at getting her to be more careful. I implied that she was wasting my time because of her carelessness.
The fear of failing is the primary reason why so many people do not succeed in life or are not as successful as they would like to be. This occurs not only in business, it occurs in all aspects of life.
– Robert Kiyosaki
Author of Rich Dad Poor Dad
After a few hours of downloads and resetting, we finally got it to the proper state. She looked up at me and in a sincere voice asked, “Dad, how did you and my big sister get to know so much about computers?” It was in that moment that a deep realization hit me. It was all the trial and error, experimenting, and, yes, even failure that had given me the experience and ability to help her through this moment.
In fact over the last couple of months, her older sister had messed up her computer several times while making some changes to the setup. She needed me to bail her out and most importantly teach her how to work around her problem and find a solution.
Yes, it was pretty clear that failures were what gave us the advantage that she was hoping to gain.
I quickly took back my original comments and told my little girl that she is doing the very thing that made it possible for her big sister and me to know so much about computers. We fail, regularly.
So often we want to save ourselves possible heart ache, so we don’t try. Out of a misguided concern for others we propagate a fear of failure in our children, friends and loved ones. But that’s how they learned to stand, walk and even ride a bike. We are born without a fear of failure and that is what gets through the necessary learning stages, including failure.
In the end, the thing we are trying to keep them and ourselves from, turns out to be the very key to the success we are looking for. The more we attempt and fail the more we learn, but perhaps the most important thing we learn (or re-learn) is that failure is not bad or scary. The only problem in failing is when we don’t get up and try again.
This short interaction with my daughter opened my mind to a truth I had been hearing my whole life but never really understood clearly until that very moment.
Failure is not bad if you learn how to let it work for you. It’s the fear of failure that keeps us living small. Fail, and fail often. Then, pretty soon the fear is gone and failure is really just an exiting part of the learning process.
Questions: What have been some of your greatest failures? How did they help you and give you an advantage you now have? What tools do you use to help you navigate through failure? You can leave a comment by clicking here.
