I’ve failed a lot in my life. But I make it a point to learn from every failure, and that’s why failure is success. It’s my motto, and I earned it the hard way.
A life measured in failures
In 1972, at twelve years old, I ran away from home, then came back to protect my sister from my father. Whatever you’re imagining, it was worse. I shielded her from his anger at real cost to myself. In high school I was turned down again and again trying to find a prom date, and felt like a failure that no one wanted to go with me, made worse by my mother’s open disappointment that I didn’t go.
I disappointed her again in 1978 by choosing a career in geology when she wanted a doctor. I dropped out of college in 1981, and even though I left for a good job, I still felt like a failure, and my parents looked down on the technical work.
I quit a company I loved in 1986 because it was about to go under, and felt like a failure, though I used the lessons to get better. I left another job in 1987 because I was working two jobs and couldn’t take the stress, and the CEO hasn’t spoken to me since. I resigned a job I loved in 1993 to go to Trader Joe’s.
In 2000 our systems crashed and my disaster recovery plans didn’t work, a real failure, so I redesigned them to be stronger. In 2005 my wife passed away after twelve and a half years of marriage, and I carried guilt that I’d failed to get her to stop smoking. In 2008 I drove to a renaissance festival to shoot three models and instead spent the whole day on the phone fixing crashed systems.
In 2013 I walked out of Trader Joe’s and left a thirty-three-year technology career to become a ghostwriter.
Why failure is success
I could have fixated on every one of those failures. I could have become a victim and done nothing with my life, which would have been the biggest failure of all. Instead I learned from each one. Every time I failed, even at twelve years old, I looked at what happened, took whatever lesson I could, and moved on.
Failure is a normal part of life. As long as you learn, failure is success. We all fail. I’ve failed, and you’ve failed, and you’ll fail again. The failure isn’t the problem. What you do with it is both the problem and the answer. Learn from it. Become better. Change your life. Don’t become like the people who hurt you. That’s what you do with failure.
One thing that helps is finding the right coach, because good advice at the right moment can be the difference between success and failure. Look at your own life honestly and ask the real question: how have you failed, and what did you learn from it?