The reality of life is that failure hits us at one point or another. As we encounter failure, any progress we make is dictated by how we perceive it and ultimately how we allow it to influence our circumstances. Some perceptions about failure are quite inaccurate and have a capacity to deter us from progress. Here are a few:

1. FAILURE IS A LEARNING EXPERIENCE
Nothing is further from the truth. Failure leads to loss. We learn nothing from our failures perse. Instead, our learning can only happen if we pick up lessons from failure and apply them practically going forward. Picking up lessons requires that we evaluate reasons for our failure. It requires us to dig deeper to understand our actions to see if we could have done things differently. Lessons from our failures are what transforms us.

2. FAILURE CATCHES US UNAWARES
Failure Mode Effect Analysis is a quality control technique employed by engineers to establish what level of stress or strain a structure can withstand before failing. This is what they use to build strong houses, sturdy dams and modern bridges. In this case, failure doesn’t come by surprise. Quite on the contrary, it is anticipated. Why? Because with each failure comes an opportunity to improve. This is the same approach used by innovators testing their prototypes in the market or business people trying to penetrate or disrupt a market with a product or service. Failure can be planned but only as a tool to learn in order to improve.

3. WHEN WE FAIL, WE JUST NEED TO RISE UP & SUCCEED
Failure hurts. After failing, the last thing in the minds of most of us is rising up again. Failure takes a heavy toll even on the strongest of us. After failure, most of us need help to rise. Most of us need people to confide in and a shoulder to cry on. It’s important not to accelerate the process of recovery from failure. There are lessons to pick just from the struggles we encounter as we seek to rise again. This doesn’t mean that we waste away in self pity. However we must be in touch with the emotions failure brings. We must learn how to manage them even as we seek to succeed in the future.

4. WE MAKE MISTAKES TO LEARN FROM THEM
Inasmuch as there’s some truth in this statement, the whole truth is that life is too short for us to keep on learning from our failures. We can instead learn from the failures of others. I remember when I was venturing into tomato farming one of my concerns was having a ready and nearby market now that tomatoes are highly perishable. So one of the priority areas I sought to learn about from other farmers was scouting for a market before harvest. I must confess that I never missed tomato buyers during the whole farming season. Learning from the mistakes of others saves us the cost of keeping on learning from our own mistakes.

5. WE FAIL IN ORDER TO HELP OTHERS
It’s important to use lessons from our failures to help others. But life has a way of throwing us into the same situations every so often. Lessons learnt from our failures are our very own greatest assets. We must seek to pick them and apply them in our lives. This way, we’ll build practical experience in dealing with and rising from failure.

Failure is not the end. We can pick lessons from it and use them to develop ourselves.