No Failures, Just Opportunities to Try Something New
"Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is
always to try just one more time."
- Thomas A. Edison
(1847-1931)
Inventor
When
success-minded people talk about being persistent, they often recount the work
inventor Thomas A. Edison did on the incandescent light. Edison's problem was finding a filament that
would burn longer than just a few minutes.
The famous story tells of how Edison tried and failed 9999 times before
he found one that worked. When asked how
he could deal with failing that many times, Edison said, "I did not fail
at all. I just found 9999 things that
did not work."
On October 21, 1879, Edison
successfully tested a carbonized filament that burned for over 13 hours. Thus, the light bulb was invented. And after 9999 "things that didn't
work", Edison had more than one filament that did work, he had well
documented each experiment and know how each filament worked; how it burned and
for how long. All this was priceless
information not only to Edison, but to inventors and scientists to this day.
How do you handle failure? Do you learn from it of just throw up your
hands is disgust? What do you do with
the information you do learn from your failures? Here are some ways to approach your
experiences in life that can make the most out of every failure and success.
Understanding your failures
If you try something and it does
not work, here are a few important questions to ask yourself:
a.
Why did it not work?
b.
What
steps did you take?
c.
What can you learn from this?
Record your failures
When things do not go as
planned, do not just walk away from them, even to try new things. First, at the site of a failure, while it is
fresh in your mind, record just want happened.
What did you do and how did you do it?
What happened at each step? Write
down as much detail as you can from the experience.
Use your failures
As you plan to make the next
step, use the information you got from the past experiences and design a new
and better plan. Part of learning from
mistakes is not just so you do not make the same mistake twice, but it is to
help you not to make a second mistake, or a third. Knowing what does not work is just as
valuable, if not more, than knowing what does work. This information will save you hours of time
and energy from heading in the wrong direction.
Try one more thing
Most important to any success
plan is that you never give up on your goal.
No matter how many times you try and fall short, try just one more
time. The only thing you gain for sure
by quitting is failure. A quitter fails
every time. A success-minded person
never fails, they just keep making new and useful discoveries.
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