There are an awful lot of quotes and cliches relating to failure.....
- Thomas A Edison said "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work".
- Winston Churchill said "Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm".
- "Failure is an event, not a person"
and there are hundreds, if not thousands more like this.
The opinion of when something is a failure will vary from event to event or person to person. Some things will be obvious - such as passing or failing an exam or test but other events or situations will be more to do with how they are perceived either by ourselves or by others.
The thought of failing may stop some people from even trying. Setting our expectations too high may lead us to viewing something as a failure if it doesn't achieve that, possibly unrealistic, expected result. Getting a job done won't be seen as failure to the person that wants it done but perhaps the person doing it knows they could have done better - maybe that's viewed as a failure.
Is anything less than perfect a failure?
We must not be define by those things we term as failures. I think Thomas A Edison made a very sensible comment - he didn't fail, but found lots of ways that didn't work. I believe the failure would have been if he had given up. If he had not pursued to getting a positive result.
Can failure make you? I guess it can! We can learn from our mistakes. We can learn not to do those things again. We can also learn that we don't have to do things perfectly in order to still get a job done and we can learn from others and the mistakes they make. Those things we view as failures may just be a case of finding our strengths and weaknesses, the things which come naturally to us and those that don't.
Don't let failure become part of who you are - it isn't!
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