Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward towards success.

Do we fail forward towards success? Intuitively that sounds completely wrong.

If you are failing then you must be doing something wrong, right? Not necessarily. What if you are failing because each time you are trying to push yourself past whatever you had accomplished previously?

After my biggest failure in life, I walked around for the better part of a year and a half in shell shock. Trying to make sense of what had happened and trying to understand what options were at my disposal going forward.

During this period, I started becoming much more aware of the failures that all of my heroes had gone through. Muhammad Ali losing his title by being a conscientious objector, Edison burning through thousands of lightbulbs before he found one that worked, da Vinci becoming obsessed with building flying machines (that did not work until Orvil and Wilbur Wright proved his theory of bat wings being the correct arched wing solution, hundreds of years later) Steve Jobs being forced out of Apple, and so on.

I think that failure is evidence that you tried to attempt something that was bigger than what you had taken on before. There is no shame in failure. That is a concept. There is a shame in failing but not learning the lesson from the failure. That would absolutely be a shame.

Recognizing the lesson that comes with the failure, allows you to stand on the shoulders of the previous mistake and make different choices. Hopefully those choices are more educated and they give way to a newfound success.

Allowing yourself the space to be less than perfect is perhaps the greatest tool that comes from this perspective. Being less than perfect allows the opportunity to move ever closer towards perfection which is an absolute and unattainable anyway.

I think life is about going out and giving it everything you’ve got, without fear of failure or regret. At some point you need to recognize that you are all that you have and if you are not giving yourself all that you can and if you are not growing as aptly as you may, you are ultimately letting yourself down in the process.

Fail forward🏅⭐️🥂

Please follow and like us:
Pin Share
Share:
Written by Brian Weiner
When I was 5 years old, I discovered that the lemon tree in the backyard + dixie cups + water and sugar and I was in business. I have been hooked on that ever since. In 1979, I borrowed $14,000 to create a brand new product... photographic greeting cards with no text on the inside, called Paradise Photography. That was the start of The Illusion Factory. Since then, The Illusion Factory has been entrusted by all of the major studios and broadcasters with the advertising and marketing of over $7 billion in filmed, live, broadcast, gaming, AR, VR and regulated gaming forms of entertainment, generating more than $100 Billion in revenue and 265 awards for creativity and technology for our clients. When I took a break from film school at UCLA to move to Hawaii, my mother did not lecture me. Instead, she took 150 of her favorite aphorisms and in her beautiful calligraphy, wrote them artistically throughout a blank journal. That is the origin of the Lessons from the Mountain series. Since then, on my journeys to the top of a mountain to watch the sunrise, I have spent countless hours contemplating words of wisdom from the sages of all races, genders and political persuasions, constantly accumulating the thoughts to guide me on my life path. I hope you enjoy my books. Please let me know your thoughts, as I highly value your feedback!