Michael Jordan—widely considered to be the greatest basketball player to ever step on the court—once said:
“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
When someone who has accomplished so much in their career talks about their failures, it’s usually a good idea to try to grasp the concept.
I think a lot of the time we view failure like it’s an obstacle. We think of it as something that opposes us.
So much negative energy and thought goes into a failure.
Sometimes failure is really hard. You don’t get a job you want, maybe you lose a job you really liked, you crash and burn on a project, whatever it is.
You fail. I fail. It seems inevitable.
It feels like it was once thought that failure was avoidable. We certainly work to make that the case. Our goal is never to fail.
As I get older it feels like it’s something that I can’t dodge so easily anymore.
But if failure is unavoidable, and some of the most successful people in the world have failed a bunch of times, should we be viewing it differently?
Failure feels a little bit necessary. It’s the ultimate teacher. But we feel burdened or maybe discouraged by it.
When you do hard things, or accomplish something difficult, how liberating does the finish feel?
If you ever watch any of those HGTV shows, they always show some dramatic problem in the middle of the episode.
They’ll be renovating a kitchen and discover the floor boards are all rotted out and for some reason it’s going to cost an extra 50k. They seem to always have to go through this opposition before they hit you with the finished product.
Every episode goes through a stage of drudgery. They went into it with one expectation, only to be forced to change course.
We walk into many situations like this. When that expectation is not fulfilled, it feels a bit like failure.
But it changes us.
We become more motivated, more careful, more focused. The circumstances tend to inspire us to never go through that again.
We find new ways to fix old problems. At the very least, we try. Failure plays such an important role in our lives.
Think back on a time when your expectations weren’t met, or you felt like you failed at something.
What happened after that? How did it pave a different path for you? What things did you learn? Did it build character or maybe teach you a life lesson?
It’s never fun to screw up. In fact, it can be horrible sometimes.
Failure can be demoralizing. But it also has the greatest impact on who we become in this life.
We learn that life isn’t always sunshine. There are many rainy days out there, both in the past and the future. Those rainy days remind us not to take the sunny ones for granted.
Failure doesn’t always have to beat us down. We don’t have to let it.
Once our expectations change, our outlook changes, and we recognize failing as a necessity to growth—no matter how difficult it might seem.