Perhaps, there has been something in your work life that you have failed to do successfully. Maybe a project you directed lost money due to poor planning. Maybe you have lost a job because you failed to bring a problem to the attention of your boss. It’s easy for us to connect failing to being a failure. Actually, failing can be a good thing.
Failure can make you work harder.
Consider the number of failures Colonel Sanders had trying to sell his chicken recipe or Thomas Edison attempting to get his light bulb to work. In fact, when a reporter asked Edison how it felt to have 1000 failures, he responded, “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.” Madame Curie, who won the Nobel Prize twice, often spent entire days stirring boiling cauldrons of uranium-rich pitchblende to extract and isolate the radioactive elements. Although crushed by exhaustion, she persevered. She said, “I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy.”
Failure can force you to take a good hard look at yourself.
It can be a life lesson. Billy Bush was a successful host of a Hollywood celebrity gossip show, called Extra. A tape from 2005 surfaced during the 20016 Presidential Campaign. The newly discovered tape showed Bush interviewing Donald Trump, who was at that time, the host of the television show, The Apprentice. Bush laughed when Trump made a lewd comment about his sexual prowess with women. Bush was immediately fired. At the same time, his marriage was faltering and near divorce. Bush recently said that “A good wallop on the side of the head changed him.” He believes he is now a better version of the man he was because the experience gave him time for self-reflection.” He is now going to be a host and producer of a new show and his marriage is in good shape.
Failure can make you successful if you learn from your mistakes.
You will bring new wisdom to your next job or life situation. You will know what NOT to do in similar situations or how much to risk. Many interviewers believe that if you have gone through a bad situation and come out the other side, you demonstrate true grit. The newspapers have reported countless stories of performers, musicians and even CEO’s who have come back and done it successfully. Take, for example, Steve Jobs. He got fired from a company he founded. He loved what he was doing and went on to found Pixar Animation and NeXT. Eventually, he was brought back to Apple and the rest is history. Robert Downey Junior, the actor, almost lost his acting career because of drug addiction, but he licked it and now is a highly sought after actor.
If you fail or are fired, it is devastating. However, consider what you need to learn from the experience and force yourself to think positively. Launch the second coming of yourself. A new life awaits!
Additional Articles about ‘Failure’ from Impact Communications
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Impact Communications, Inc. was established in 1998. It is a national presentation communication skills and telephone communication skills training company that excels at defining and developing the core elements of effective business communication. With presentation communication skills training, telephone communications skills training, every encounter can be an efficient and lucid transmission of information.
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