Failure by Leslie Fieger

Any person who goes through life without experiencing failure is the ultimate failure in life.

Why? Because if a person has never failed, they have never attempted to achieve or accomplish extraordinary goals. They have not reached for excellence and have stayed safely within the realm of mediocrity.

Success is not defined by or built upon the absence of failure. Rather, success is felt only when failure is accepted as part of the process and is overcome.

An athlete becomes an outstanding success when she set new records. Babe Ruth set home run records. He also set strike out records. Every strike out was a failure at bat. The average major league player is taught by batting coaches to 'get a hit' or avoid strikeouts rather than strive for a home run.

Most highly successful entrepreneurs fail multiple times in the process of hitting their home runs.

A child learning to walk falls down many times before taking those successful first steps, then stumbles and falls again and again before being able to walk, and then run.  The body needs to learn the failure before it can know the success.

Without the willingness to experience yet another failure, no child would ever walk. Without the willingness to experience failure, no great deed would ever get done, no new thing would ever be accomplished, nothing new would ever be learned.

Thomas A. Edison would only have been a failure if he had not been prepared to fail thousands of times before hitting on the right combo of gas and filament in his quest to invent the electric light bulb. His attitude was so focused on success that he did not even consider these failed attempts as failures. He called them successful eliminations of ways that did not work.

Another highly successful person, the great hockey player who set all kinds of scoring records, Wayne Gretzky, who missed (or failed at) more than 90% of his shots, once said, "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."

Only when you are prepared to fail, will you ever truly succeed. Those who risk the most failures, succeed the most.

In other words, embrace failure...it demonstrates that you are on your way to success.