Success and Failure: Polar Opposites Or Kissing Cousins

I think about success and failure a lot, because like many of you, I am on my own personal success journey. I am constantly seeking even the smallest kernels of wisdom and insight into what causes people to succeed, and just as importantly why we so often fail.

I came across an "O" (The Oprah magazine) article recently from author Martha Beck. Martha is a life coach, best-selling author and regular contributor to "O". In the article entitled "The Woman Who Fell To Earth", Beck discusses how failure and success have not only been intertwined in her life, but how success has been directly born of her failures.

When I was in college, I experienced one of only two job interviews in my entire life that I consider having "failed" (the other one is a long story having to do with a purple chiffon dress...Never mind). This interview was with a major corporation; a huge corporation at the time. The interviewers, two men in dark suits, "IBM" ties and spotless white starched shirts, had been interviewing me (read "grilling" me) for nearly an hour. As we came toward the end of the interview, they asked me one of those questions designed to give them insight into my personality; one of those character traits questions regarding overcoming adversity, etc.

They asked me to describe two or three instances where I had failed, and my subsequent solutions. They wanted to see how I would answer the question, what I perceived as failure, yada, yada, yada, the standard canned interview stuff. The problem for me was that I couldn't answer their question. I froze. That was something that never happened to me in interviews. Even as a teenager interviewing for part-time jobs, my mother, God bless her, had been an extremely good jobs skills coach. I always knew how to conduct myself in interviews, how to handle interview questions, what was proper interview attire (except the mistake of the purple chiffon dress...Never mind!) I digress.

The reason I couldn't answer the interviewers' question, was that there was nothing that up to that point in my life I considered a failure. I honestly couldn't answer the question. If I said I had never failed, I would have come off as extremely arrogant and a liar, because everybody fails at something. But in that moment, I couldn't think of or describe a single thing which I considered having failed, and I knew if I somehow tried to explain, these two guys surely wouldn't understand. I have never forgotten that experience, nor the lesson for me in it.

For you who may view success and failure as opposing ends of a spectrum, the concept of a symbiotic relationship between the two may seem odd. In the beginning, this may be a hard concept for you to grasp, but once you've had an opportunity to see both failure and success from this perspective, it makes sense. I have for quite some time been of the mind that the more I fail, the better will ultimately be my success.

This doesn't mean that I intentionally set out in my various endeavors to fail. I'm not any more happy about failure or the difficulty and even painfulness of the experience than would you be. But I know that somehow in the failure, I always learn something and that something always gets me one step closer to where it is I want to be. I know and understand that failure comes to all of us no matter how we try to avoid it. The difference is that those who ultimately succeed, those who have learned the value in failure, know it as a point of some of the greatest opportunities for learning and growth, which brings us ever closer to the success we desire.

When we learn to accept failure as a part of the process to our success, we can relax some, allowing ourselves to move through failure rather than fighting against it. And from that place, the place of acceptance of failure as part of the process, we can allow ourselves to see our failure for what it really is; not "the end of the road" but a bend in the road to our success.

Failure teaches us about ourselves. That is why we often view it as an unpleasant experience. But the more we learn about ourselves, our strengths, weaknesses, fears, attitudes, and behaviors, the better and wiser and stronger we become.

In your quest for success, know that success is the end result. Know that you will ultimately succeed and not fail, but also know that on your way to success you will experience failure not once, but many times. Then when you do fail, it won't take you by surprise nor will it devastate you. It may not feel so good when you're in it, but it's a stage that passes.

Once you have conquered failure, it loses its power to hinder you or to make you weak. You can then wield it as a most useful tool and weapon in fashioning your strongest success.

A great website for information on issues relating to success is Steve Pavlina's website at http://www.StevePavlina.com.