If you are not failing, you are doing something wrong. Having made that statement, let me attempt to read your reaction. You either read what I just said, thought about it, and reached eventual agreement or you violently disagreed by throwing old fruit at your computer. Probably the latter.

I’m not going to bother asking you if you have ever failed at something, I know you have. How that failure made you feel is what I’m more interested in. For most people, it’s disheartening. You just spent a significant portion of your free time working on an application for indexing the entire internet only to discover a fundamental problem that you totally didn’t anticipate. Until now you had been feeling as though, day by day, you were making progress, but now, the huge road block causes you to feel quite the opposite. Now you have to accept that you didn’t know what you were doing and you had been wasting your time while you actually believed you were making progress. All that time wasted. You screwed up. You blew it. How will your mother ever look at you the same again?

The natural extension of this mentality is that failure becomes known as something people will avoid at all costs – leading to one of two possible situations. You either don’t apply yourself in ways where there is even the slightest chance of failure; you’re so afraid of failing that you never do anything that may result in failure (which, by the way, is almost anything you do). You stick to what you know and never really push yourself to new boundaries. As a failurephobe, the other possible situation you may experience is one in which the more success you experience becomes directly proportional to your own sense of invincibility. As Bill Gates once said:

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.

Each new success tricks you into thinking that you are closer and closer to the point where you simply can’t fail anymore – making your inevitable failures even harder to swallow. This is completely the wrong way to think about failure and success. Considering failure as the opposite of success is a naive view of what failure actually is. Failure is not the opposite of success, but rather, failure is the only way to achieve success.

Failure is each step on a staircase. Climbing a step doesn’t get you to the top right away, but it takes you a little bit closer each time. You may be able to jump over all the steps to reach the top, but climbing them one by one will teach you much more about the path to the top and consequently make it much easier to climb to the top next time, and the time afterwards. Thomas Edison understood this when he said:

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.

It’s important to see a failure as a good thing, an event that increases your chances of reaching success each time you experience it. Learning is very much a trial and error practise, where you must expect to experience errors each time you trial. Fundamentally this is why experience is often key. The value in experience is not having done it often, it’s having seen it go wrong often. John Keats offers this advice regarding failure:

Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid.

To be great at something, you must learn to overcome the potential negatives that comes of doing it. When those potential negatives are no longer standing in your way of reaching eventual success, you’re far more likely to reach it. You must look failure in the eye and become excited at the prospect of standing there beside her, knowing how much you’re about to learn from your encounter. Now wash, rinse and repeat and you have an empty highway to success. As Robert Francis Kennedy puts it:

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.

Before you go, let me leave you with one more thought, courtesy of Thomas Watson:

The way to succeed is to double your error rate.

Conclusion

In conclusion, stop seeing failure as something to avoid and accept that it’s a natural step on the path to what ever it is you’re trying to achieve. Always expect failure and take the opportunity to learn more about the domain you’re working in. Experience through failure is just as important as experience through success, so devote just as much time learning from both types of experience.