When you fail at something, do you get discouraged and then give up? It’s easy to view failure as the end of the line, instead of what it really is – just a curve in the road.
Imagine what life would be like if we all gave up after our first few attempts failed.
None of us would be able to ride a bike, spell kat correctly, write, dress ourselves, or add and subtract. These achievements are a passage of childhood, but we rarely reflect on the number of tries it took until we were able to tie our shoelaces.
As adults, many of us have a tendency to expect perfection whenever we set out to learn something new. Experts make everything seem easy. When our initial efforts at mastering a new skill reveal how much we really have to learn, we lose our enthusiasm and give up.
Or, we don’t put ourselves out there at all.
Fear of failing can mean never trying anything outside our comfort zone, never pushing ourselves into the unknown, and never taking a risk. After all, if we don’t take chances, the risk of failure will be significantly lower, right?
That depends. Do you want to look back on your life twenty years from now, regretting you never learned Spanish, went back to school or became a writer? The same twenty years are going to pass, regardless, so why not take the chance and stretch.
Read through this list of quotes from people who all felt the sting of setbacks, yet persevered past the potholes. Pick one that strikes you, and remember it the next time you fear failure.
- You always pass failure on the way to success. – Mickey Rooney
- I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying. – Michael Jordan
- Success is often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable. – Coco Chanel
- Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. – Thomas Edison
- He who has never made a mistake is one who never does anything. – Theodore Roosevelt
- It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded. – Anne Lindbergh
- Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts. – Winston Churchill
- Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. – Steve Jobs