Life beyond failure – don’t let it get you down
‘I have not failed 10 000 times - I’ve successfully found 10 000 ways that will not work.’ (Thomas Edison)
Didn’t get the matric results you were hoping for?
Failure can make you feel truly devastated, we get it – and we feel for you.
But before you head off to Naval Island to become a professional beach bum, consider this: some of the world’s most successful people experienced massive failure before they found fame and fortune.
Thomas Edison
The guy who invented the light bulb, Thomas Edison, had some epic fails before he achieved success.
At school his teachers told him he was ‘too stupid to learn anything’.
He got fired from his first two jobs, and hundreds of his ‘inventions’ either didn’t work or got turned down.
His thoughts on failure? ‘I have not failed 10 000 times – I’ve successfully found 10 000 ways that will not work.’
Albert Einstein
Nobel Prize winner Albert Einstein fared so bad at school that his teachers thought he was mentally retarded.
But despite his dyslexia and absolute dislike of school, he later became a theoretical physicist and mathematician who figured out the Theory of Relativity.
Richard Branson
The famous entrepreneur Richard Branson left school when he was only 16 to start his own magazine.
His headmaster told him he would either end up in prison or become a millionaire.
He became a billionaire.
Today his empire, the Virgin Group, owns more than 200 companies in 30 countries around the world.
Embracing failure
However, many of his endeavours over the years have failed miserably.
In fact, Branson is a strong supporter of embracing failure, so much so that his company website devotes a whole section to the topic.
Do yourself a favour and go check it out: https://www.virgin.com/in-focus/embracing-failure
What it boils down to is this: even though failure sucks, it doesn’t mean that your life is ruined.
Lick your wounds, recalculate, get up and try again.
Learn from your mistakes and try a different approach.
Here are some motivationals to cheer you up:
• ‘Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead-end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing and being nothing’ – Denis Waitley
• ‘Pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever’ – Lance Armstrong
• ‘Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently’ – Henry Ford
• ‘Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of a greater or equal benefit’ – Napoleon Hill.
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