You probably don’t remember your early years of trying to walk. You’d push yourself up, stumble around, and then fall flat on your bum. Maybe you even cried a bit.
If you can’t remember those times, I’m sure you can remember a similar situation with teaching your own children to walk. Or maybe it was teaching your niece or nephew.
Whatever the case, in those early days of growing up, we experienced failure regularly in our lives.
And that was okay. We were also cheered on as we stumbled our way around. The people around us knew we had to fail if we wanted to accomplish something.
The older we get, the less failure we welcome into our lives. I encourage you to make failure a regular part of your life.
How To Make Failure A Regular Part Of Your Life
While failure isn’t something most of us enjoy, we know, deep down, that failure is the quickest pathway to growth. Failure teaches us what works. We also learn what does work once we shift our attempts.
To make failure (and growth) a regular part of your life, do the following:
Do something you’ve never done before:
Most failures come from doing something you’ve never done before. Remember the walking as a baby thing? You had never walked before. You failed until you eventually succeeded. Or it may have been trying to speak. You mumbled gibberish until one day the sounds coming out of your mouth made sense.
Keep trying new things. The more new things you try, the more you’ll fail. You’ll also find yourself learning and growing more.
Try something new!
Put away technology:
We rely so heavily on technology today that most people don’t even know their best friend’s phone number! Remembering a phone number is different from 20 or 30 years ago when we’d easily rattle off the phone numbers of our five closest friends. Maybe you’d even throw in a distant cousin or two to make the feat more impressive.
What I’m getting at here is that we don’t give ourselves the chance to think and remember the data we have in our minds. The information is still there, it is only underutilized.
By putting away technology, you’re going to force yourself to remember, and fail to remember, valuable information. Yet, when you put this into practice, you’ll learn through the failures.
You might begin to remember more scripture verses and where they can be found in the Bible. The phone numbers of valuable clients may come to you easily after you stumbled through them the first two or three times.
By putting technology away, you’re going to fail to remember. But you’re going to force yourself to think and remember. This will help you process things once you get over the failure!
Play a game:
In the world of games, whether it be a video game or a game of sports, there are winners and losers. The losers are the ones who fail.
Put yourself out there. Play a game of softball with your coworkers, pick up the Playstation 5 controller and race other competitors in Gran Turismo 7, or go to the Pickleball courts and lose to one of the old guys playing there.
Games are a great place to try and fail. You’ll learn you can’t win every time. There are going to be times when someone is just better than you. It’ll teach you that it’s okay.
Failure Isn’t Fatal
I want to leave you with a John Maxwell quote. John once said:
Wake up and realize this: Failure is simply a price we pay to achieve success.
We cannot achieve the success we’re longing for in life if we’re unwilling to fail. Each time we fail, we get closer to our vision of success.
Keep trying. Keep failing. Keep growing. Keep reaching for success.
