Failure is the quintessence of success

All success is the result of failure. It takes repeated attempts to succeed before success is achieved. Just think how many times you tried to drive a car before you got the hang of it. Success, of course, is "better" than failure, but success is not possible without failure. The progress of civilization is the accumulation of myriad failures followed by small successes, with the successes incorporated into the intellectual capital of mankind. Those societies that encourage failure in that way also encourage success. A father who punishes his sons for their failed attempts discourages them from making new attempts. See what I mean?

In our culture, mistake-making is not allowed, or at least it's not admitted. Sharing best practices is popular these days, but what about sharing worst practices or lessons learned? Wouldn't this approach provide some essential learnings? With best practices sharing, you run the risk of squelching innovation and creative thinking. People think: "That's how it's supposed to be done, so why should I bother to look for new and better ways?" Worst practices sharing or lessons learned leaves the door open for generating new ideas, and it provides people with valuable information about what to avoid.

No amount of analysis can replace your confidence in yourself. When you’ve made a mistake, especially a visible one that impacts other people, it’s natural to question your ability to perform next time. But you must get past your doubts. The best you can do is study the past, practice for the situations you expect, and get back in the game. Your studying of the past should help broaden your perspective. You want to be aware of how many other smart, capable well meaning people have made similar mistakes to the one you made, and went on to even bigger mistakes, I mean successes, in the future.

One way to know you’ve reached a healthy place is your sense of humor. It might take a few days, but eventually you’ll see some comedy in what happened. When friends tell stories of their mistakes it makes you laugh, right? Well when you can laugh at your own mistakes you know you’ve accepted it and no longer judge yourself on the basis of one single event. Reaching this kind of perspective is very important in avoiding future mistakes. Humor loosens up your psychology and prevents you from obsessing about the past. It’s easy to make new mistakes by spending too much energy protecting against the previous ones. Remember the saying “a man fears the tiger that bit him last, instead of the tiger that will bite him next”.

So the most important lesson in all of mistake making is to trust that while mistakes are inevitable, if you can learn from the current one, you’ll also be able to learn from future ones. No matter when happens tomorrow you’ll be able to get value from it, and apply it to the day after that. Progress won’t be a straight line but if you keep learning you will have more successes than failures, and the mistakes you make along the way will help you get to where you want to go.