Failing Forward: Turning Mistakes into Stepping Stones for Success

by John C. Maxwell

Procrastination steals a person’s time, productivity, and potential.

Rather than pursue worthy objectives, they avoid the pain of making mistakes. And in the midst of that transition, they lose sight of any sense of purpose that they might have once possessed.

Misused energy. Constant fear divides the mind and causes a person to lose focus. If he is going in too many directions at once, he doesn’t get anywhere.

To conquer fear, you have to feel the fear and take action anyway.

Motivation is not going to strike you like lightning. And motivation is not something that someone else—nurse, doctor, family member—can bestow or force on you. The whole idea of motivation is a trap. Forget motivation. Just do it.

Do it without motivation and then guess what. After you start doing the thing, that’s when the motivation comes and makes it easy for you to keep on doing it.

As Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner says, “You’re more likely to act yourself into feeling than feel yourself into action.” So act! Whatever it is you know you should do, do it.

George Bernard Shaw asserted, “A life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.” To overcome fear and break the cycle, you have to be willing to recognize that you will spend much of your life making mistakes. The bad news is that if you’ve been inactive for a long time, getting started is hard to do. The good news is that as soon as you start moving, it gets easier.

If you can take action and keep making mistakes, you gain experience. (That’s why President Theodore Roosevelt said, “He who makes no mistakes makes no progress.”) That experience eventually brings competence, and you make fewer mistakes. As a result, your fear becomes less paralyzing. But the whole cycle-breaking process starts with action. You must act your way into feeling, not wait for positive emotions to carry you forward.

If you have always had a hard time failing forward, then you have to get yourself moving. It doesn’t matter what has stopped you or how long you have been inactive. The only way to break the cycle is to face your fear and take action, even though it may seem small or insignificant.

When it comes to getting over the emotional hurts of failure, it really doesn’t matter how good or bad your personal history is. The only thing that matters is that you face your fear and get moving. Do that, and you give yourself the opportunity to learn how to fail forward.

The old saying is true: If you always do what you’ve always done, then you will always get what you’ve always gotten.

H. Stanley Judd said, “Don’t waste energy trying to cover up failure. Learn from your failures and go on to the next challenge. It’s okay to fail. If you’re not failing, you’re not growing.” Anyone who wants to get off the failure freeway needs to ’fess up rather than cover up.

William Dean Singleton, co-owner of MediaNews Group Inc., addresses this tendency: “Too many people, when they make a mistake, just keep stubbornly plowing ahead and end up repeating the same mistakes. I believe in the motto, ‘Try and try again.’ But the way I read it, it says, ‘Try, then stop and think. Then try again.’”

General Peyton C. March perceived, “Any man worth his salt will stick up for what he believes right, but it takes a slightly bigger man to acknowledge instantly and without reservation that he is in error.”

Personal growth expert Paul J. Meyer says, “Ninety percent of all those who fail are not actually defeated. They simply quit.”

There’s really only one solution to the gridlock on the failure freeway, and that’s to wake up and find the exit. To leave the road of continual failure, a person must first utter the three most difficult words to say: “I was wrong.”

Every failure you experience is a fork in the road. It’s an opportunity to take the right action, learn from your mistakes, and begin again.

Leadership expert Peter Drucker says, “The better a man is, the more mistakes he will make, for the more new things he will try. I would never promote to a top-level job a man who was not making mistakes . . . otherwise he is sure to be mediocre.” Mistakes really do pave the road to achievement.

Mistakes are . . . Messages that give us feedback about life. Interruptions that should cause us to reflect and think. Signposts that direct us to the right path. Tests that push us toward greater maturity. Awakenings that keep us in the game mentally. Keys that we can use to unlock the next door of opportunity. Explorations that let us journey where we’ve never been before. Statements about our development and progress.

Michael Korda, editor in chief of Simon and Schuster, declared, “Success on any major scale requires you to accept responsibility . . . In the final analysis, the one quality that all successful people have is the ability to take on responsibility.”

Stewart B. Johnson remarked, “Our business in life is not to get ahead of others, but to get ahead of ourselves—to break our own records, to outstrip our yesterday by our today.”

It is easy to dodge our responsibilities, but we cannot dodge the consequences of our responsibilities. —SIR JOSIAH STAMP

Life is not simply holding a good hand. Life is playing a poor hand well. —DANISH SAYING

At no time in life are people more prone to allow failure to overcome them and to give up than when external circumstances cause extreme hardship or grief. But ultimately no matter whether the difficulty is self-created or comes from somewhere outside them, failure is created within them. It is always an inside job.

no matter what happens to you, the important thing is what happens in you.

“I could have filed for bankruptcy. But I didn’t want to do that. That’s when the principles that I had learned a few days earlier at the leadership conference came back to me: It’s not what happens to me; it’s what happens in me. It’s not the size of the problem, but how I handle the problem. When I fall, keep getting up. I was determined to overcome this experience,”

Many people desire to control the circumstances of their lives, but the truth is that we cannot determine what will come our way. We can’t control the hands we’re dealt, only how we play the cards.

South African general Jan Christiaan Smuts declared, “A man is not defeated by his opponents but by himself.”

Your attitude determines your outlook.

How do you cultivate optimism? By learning the secret of contentment. If you can learn that, then no matter what happens to you, you can weather the storm and build on the good you find in any situation.

Being content doesn’t mean being satisfied with a bad situation. It simply means having a good attitude as you work your way out of it.

Contentment comes from having a positive attitude. It means • expecting the best in everything—not the worst. • remaining upbeat—even when you get beat up. • seeing solutions in every problem—not problems in every solution. • believing in yourself—even when others believe you’ve failed. • holding on to hope—even when others say it’s hopeless.

You cannot win the internal battle against failure without the positive attitude that contentment provides. But if you think positively and do nothing, you will not be able to fail forward. You must add positive action to a positive attitude.

Some people get into trouble because they focus their attention on things beyond their control. Leadership expert Fred Smith says that the key to positive action is to know the difference between a problem and a fact of life. A problem is something that can be solved. A fact of life is something that must be accepted.

Failure is an inside job. So is success. If you want to achieve, you have to win the war in your thinking first. You can’t let the failure outside you get inside you. You certainly can’t control the length of your life—but you can control its width and depth. You can’t control the contour of your face—but you can control its expression. You can’t control the weather—but you can control the atmosphere of your mind. Why worry about things you can’t control when you can keep yourself busy controlling the things that depend on you?

Handicaps can only disable us if we let them. This is true not only of physical challenges, but of emotional and intellectual ones as well . . . I believe that real and lasting limitations are created in our minds, not our bodies. —ROGER CRAWFORD

Arnold Palmer. Once when asked about his performance at the Open on hole nine, he commented, “That doggone plaque will be there long after I’m gone. But you have to put things like that behind you. That’s one of the wonderful things about golf. Your next shot can be as good or bad as your last one—but you’ll always get another chance.”2

But tragedies don’t have to stop a person from possessing a positive outlook, being productive, and living life to the fullest.

Rationalization creates a fog that hinders people from finding solutions to their problems. Excuses, no matter how strong, never lead to achievement.

There are people who’ve had it better than you and done worse. And there are people who’ve had it worse than you and done better. The circumstances really have nothing to do with getting over your personal history. Past hurts can make you bitter or better—the choice is yours.

Instead of lamenting the loss of her dream and the hurts of her youth, she moved on and did what she could where God put her.

Failure is the greatest opportunity I have to know who I really am. —JOHN KILLINGER

Sometimes great achievement can come only as the result of a period of failure

John James Audubon was unsuccessful for most of his life. It took him until he was thirty-five years old to figure out what his problem was: himself.

It didn’t matter how many times he changed locations, partners, or business types. Not until he understood and changed himself did he have a chance at success.

If you are continually experiencing trouble or facing obstacles, then you should check to make sure that you are not the problem.

We can change our whole life and the attitude of people around us simply by changing ourselves. —RUDOLF DREIKURS

All of the significant battles are waged within the self. —SHELDON KOPP

“Most people try to beat down their flaws or deny them altogether,” notes Marshall. “I’ve always found it best to say, ‘Here are my flaws. Now I have to find something I’m good at.’ Don’t use your flaws as an excuse to quit. Move forward or sideways.”