Failure

Failure is more often than not seen as a bad thing. But failure for one person isn’t always the same for another. How we respond to failure is what makes or breaks us. This week in Deeper Thoughts let’s talk about failure, persistence, and what makes a failure a true failure. 

There are two types of people when it comes to failure. Those who give up, and those who LEARN from failure. These are the people who examine their failures. They look at what they did wrong, what they should’ve done differently and know to apply it in the future. These same people will even look into what they did right, and see what they could have done better.

When we see someone who’s successful, (based on what our perception of what success is) we only see the success. We don’t see the failures that came before that success. All the mistakes that person made are oblivious to us. We don’t see how many times they fell and got back up.

Many times someone decides they want to start a business. They either invest in tools they need for manufacturing or take their money to buy products to sell in a shopfront they rent out. They’re certain they have what it takes and they quit their job, which is their primary source of income because they have faith in this endeavour.

But sales don’t come in, be it in the retail store they’ve rented or the shop they’ve created. A few might trickle in here or there, but not enough to be sustainable. After a few months funds begin to dwindle and eventually they have to close up shop and get another job again.

Now in this scenario we have two people. One will just give up and go back to work. The other will go back to work as well, but they look at what went wrong. Well the first thing they’ll notice is they went all in and quit their main job without establishing any clientele or business reputation. So they decide to try again, but to run this business on the side.

So they continue this route. Working their 9-5 to pay bills, but in their free time working on this side business they have. Sales come in from time to time, but again nothing sustainable and with hardly any growth. Again some give up after several months, but then there are still those who take a step back to examine what’s going wrong. Upon researching they realize they need to do better at marketing themselves. So they print business cards, and begin heavily advertising themselves on their personal media and even creating pages for their business to advertise and push.

After advertising for several months sales have started increasing but there’s still not enough revenue coming in. Again others might see this as failure and give up, but then there are those few who will look at things and realize after more studying that they’ve realized that they’ve been underpricing themselves. So after some trial and error they raise their prices to match the quality of their work or wares instead of trying to undercut others to get ahead.

Now over time with proper pricing, advertising, and growing clientele and a reputation with this side hustle have scaled it to the point that they can eventually leave that 9-5 they want out of and have a business of their own.

These steps over time add up. The people who take a look at these failures and learn lessons from them continue with persistence and despite those failures learn how to overcome and avoid them.

But even in this scenario there are things failure might teach a person. While the person might want to be financially independent, after even several attempts to own their own business they might realize that they don’t want to achieve that independence in this manner. This failure might make them research other ways to achieve this end. They might start looking into investing in stocks or saving up to invest in real estate. And in that process there will most likely be failures that they will either give up on, or they’ll learn from and persist until they achieve their dream.

Now here I’ve only talked about failure in the business sense, but we can look at failure this way in other aspects of our lives. Sometimes these might be harder to pinpoint. In relationships when things tend to not work out, we can look at these failures and see how they’re due to aspects of ourselves. These types of failures might point to fragmented parts of us we need to heal, especially when we look through the lense of our own habits and coping mechanisms. It can also point to why we seek out traits in partners that we’re incompatible with.

Do your relationships fail because you’re not upfront about your expectations?  Or do they fail because you start out putting your best foot forward only to stop doing so once you’re in the relationship? Maybe you seek out partners you can take care of, but because of childhood wounding only seek out a partner that doesn’t need or want that?

Learn from your failures. They’re the best teachers. And if you are learning something from them, especially lessons you can carry with you into the future, are they truly failures? Have you failed, or did you learn a lesson for the next step?

Thank you for reading. I hope you all have a very enlightening day.