I Failed!!

1982-1 

1983-5

1984-7

1985-1

1993-1

1994-1

1995-1

1999-1

2001-1

2002-1

2005-1

2010-1

2011-1

2012-1

The above years and numbers of failures only relate to my attempts to get a job/promotion.  Only one body of work.  There may have been a few more but these are the ones I recall the best.  I was hired or promoted 6 times over the span of my 37+ years in the fire service.  But, 24 times, I failed.  1 success for every 4 attempts.  I failed 3/4 of the time.  

You can only succeed if your are willing to fail.  The only sure way to avoid failure is to not attempt to succeed.  There is no risk in not giving it a shot.  

Failure is more than just not succeeding.  It is your opportunity to attempt something that may be above your range or out of your comfort zone.  It is an opportunity to learn something about yourself as well as whatever you are attempting.  If you don’t want to learn about yourself, learn about your field, don’t want to push yourself to improve, then don’t try.  Be good with not taking chances, be ok with not exposing yourself to risk.  If you want to remain status quo, then stay on the bench.  

Failure can be embarrassing.  Failure can be discouraging.  But better to have tried and failed than to not have tried at all.  If you attempt and fail, you can at least say you put yourself out there, opened yourself to being vulnerable, took a chance on yourself.  That is what leaders do.  

When you are watching sports highlights, you will see Super Bowl winning plays, world record pole vaults, and fastest lap times.  But if you take a look at the blooper reel, you might see some of those champions failing to cross the finish line because they ran out of gas or the vault that goes under the bar. 

The steps to the top, whatever your top might be, are built on failures.  Show me a great leader, a successful person (or organization) in their industry and I can guarantee that we can dig up a list of failures.  

WD-40.  You heard of that.  It got it’s name because it was the 40th attempt at the product recipe.  They tried one, it failed and they retried.  And they are still producing it today.  Kodak was THE film company. The digital era wasn’t the downfall of Kodak.  Kodak invented the first digital camera but out of fear for their film products didn’t capitalize on their technology.  Today, they are still in business but continue to struggle because they didn’t put themselves out there (vulnerability) haven’t evolved, didn’t learn from their mistakes.  The Wright Brothers had multiple failures before their craft took to the skies.  

Go out, try, fail, learn and move on.  If the pain of failure is too much, consider staying where you are comfortable or change your path to something easier where you won’t have any failures.  But if you want to live your fullest, try, attempt, challenge yourself, fail and learn.  If you do that enough times you will find success.