Many of us regard failure as a sign of weakness and do not dare to imagine that failure is the precursor to eventual success. It is not failing that we should fear but giving up and not trying again and again.

Failing successfully

Do you like to fail? Of course you don't, and I haven't found people who like to fail and take pride in themselves for being outstanding failures. Many of us have been brought up to think that success is the best thing, and failure is bad. From tests to businesses and our careers, it seems logical for us to aspire to succeed. This mentality we have makes us success-fixated and failure-averse. Failure is simply not attractive.
Success is a great experience, and failure leads to disappointment in oneself and it makes one lose self-confidence. Some of us even treat failure as if it is the end of the world. After someone fails to start a business, we say that there is no hope for that person, and he or she should try to do something else, as business clearly doesn't seem to work. Is that really true? Well, sometimes failure can yield a very positive outcome.
Thomas Edison failed 10,000 times before he made the electric light, and here is what he had to say about it: "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." Billions of people today live off his invention. Imagine if he got discouraged after his 4th attempt and lost confidence? We would probably be many years behind the kind of technological advancement we are experiencing today. So what does this really tell us about failure?
We can learn as much from failure as we do from success. Actually, we learn little from succeeding in something at the first attempt, because all we know is that one way that it worked, while if we succeed at the 10th attempt we would have a better lesson. A failure can get us closer to getting it right. For one to experience new things in life, he/she will have to be ready to make mistakes. Failure is not a sign of incapability; it is a sign of the necessity of learning and exploring. By failing, we can see the wrong ways, which gets us closer and closer to the right way.
A businessperson would tell you that where there is more risk, there is greater outcome. Risk takers are not scared of failing. Instead, they learn from it, so as to get closer to accuracy, which has an even greater yield. On the other side, people who are too scared to fail are too scared to lose, end up with average outcome. Failing is not a sin, as long as there is a positive outcome to it.
One man that many people know is Bill Gates, and we know him for his greatest success of writing the Microsoft software. He did not succeed at creating Microsoft in one try, and he didn't avoid failure. Instead, he made his idea happen. One failure or one risk didn't discourage him from achieving what he was most passionate about. Instead, he persisted, and he reached further than one could ever imagine.
Our failure depends on how we react to it. We learn some of the greatest lessons in life by failing. However, by accepting failure as the end of our journey, we are formally declaring that we are failures. Everyone fails. Woody Allen, a famous American film director, once said, "If you are not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything innovative." A mind-set ready to fail many times in life and ready to react to it in a positive manner can turn that failure into a success. However, seeing a failure as the end of a journey would keep us away from what we want to achieve. There is nothing satisfying as succeeding after a series of failures. We tend to appreciate what we get because we have earned it; it wasn't a given.
One thing we are all guilty of is not trying to make our ideas happen throughout our education or even careers because we are afraid to fail. We are afraid of getting a question wrong when asked in a class and scared of asking because it might sound silly and might make us feel ashamed of admitting we don't know. We are afraid to take risks in our work place because we are scared of failing and being fired. We get scared of making mistakes when speaking in a language that is not our mother tongue. We tend to be too scared of failing that we miss the greatest lessons we can get from failure.
If one is ready to fall, then one must be ready to rise, to recuperate and to achieve his/her potential. The great Chinese philosopher Confucius once said, "Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall." Failure is simply a feedback, and it is up to us to make our path towards success using that feedback.

Yoseph can be reached at askyoseph@gmail.com