Failure: Necessity of Invention & Essential for Success

A post by guest blogger, Tim Eyre, on learning from failure.

"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm." - Winston Churchill

Failure. The word conjures up all sorts of negative images in people's minds. It's something people don't like to think about. But maybe that's because people don't really understand it. Ask yourself the following question: who never fails? The answer, of course, is nobody. We all fail at a lot of things all the time. The very best hitters in baseball fail 7 out of 10 times. Thomas Edison failed over a thousand times before he finally invented the light bulb. Abraham Lincoln failed in many military, business, and political roles before he became one of the nation's most successful presidents. Henry Ford failed in five attempts to start a business before finally succeeding with what turned out to be one of the world's biggest motor companies. The Wright brothers suffered numerous failures in their attempts to invent the airplane before finally building a machine that got off the ground.

The right way to think about failure is that every time you fail you are simply taking one additional step on your ultimate path to success. If you think about it, there has never been a success which was not preceded by failures - usually many of them. When a young reporter asked Edison how it felt to fail so many times, his response was that he actually never failed once. His invention of the light bulb just happened to be a two-thousand step process.

The only really negative aspect about failing is what we often let it do to us internally. We sometimes become so afraid of the stigma of failure that we no longer try new things. When we allow ourselves to adopt that mindset, we miss out on the opportunity to succeed. The way to avoid that trap is to view failure for what it really is...a necessary prerequisite for success. Here are some reasons why this is true:

1. Every time you fail, you learn from it.
Failure is a teaching tool on multiple levels. For one thing, it teaches you what didn't work. This gives you a valuable data point to help you plan what to do next - and also what to avoid doing. Knowing this information increases your probability of success on your next try. When you analyze your failure and understand where you went wrong, you are learning by trial and error how to get it right. You are also learning something about yourself. You are learning how you react to the failure and what adjustments you may need to make the next time around.

2. Failure brings on new opportunities.
Everything happens for a reason. When one door closes, another one opens. Failure should never be viewed as the end of the road, but instead as the beginning of a new road and often one that is much richer with opportunity. There are very often situations where, if you hadn't failed the first time around, you would never have been motivated to explore a path which you never knew about but which actually turned out to be a whole lot more fruitful for you.

3. Failing makes you stronger.
Once you've tasted failure, you've already swallowed what you thought was a deadly poison. But guess what? You survived. And not only that, you became much stronger for the experience. Now failure won't be nearly as scary next time around. Failure can actually embolden you to focus and try harder, either because you are no longer as fearful of it and therefore will be more willing to take risks, or because you are motivated by the determination to not let it happen again. The point is that after failing, you are never the same person you were before. You are at a new level and at that level you are much closer to your goal of success.

4. Sometimes what you think is a failure is really not.
Believe it or not, some of the most significant inventions in our history have occurred by accident. Things like super glue, microwave ovens, pacemakers, and even penicillin, were all discovered while scientists were experimenting on something else entirely. These great inventions were in fact stumbled upon by inventors who failed at what they were really trying to do. At least they thought they failed. But nobody would consider them failures now.

Anyone who views failure as a completely negative experience has it all wrong. Failure is literally the path to success. Not only is it a path, but it is the only path. If you don't fail, you don't learn - and when you don't learn, you cannot succeed. Once you realize the many benefits of failure you begin to see it in a completely different light. And this is when you put yourself in your best position to succeed.

In his role in the self storage industry, Tim Eyre helps customers care for their cherished belongings that must be put in storage. Tim regularly visits his facilities including a Philadelphia Self Storage center. He also was recently meeting customers and staff at the Baltimore Self Storage Center.