Failure... for most of us goes beyond being just a word. Sometimes, it is important that we stop giving words more power than they truly deserve. I wish to speak about my observations/ways to transform oneself from being someone who is struggling with a fear of failure into a confident being.
For an unsuccessful being, everyone around seem to be frustrated with him/her as he/she was always trying, but never saw anything go through, because once he/she started, he/she became paralyzed with fear that he/she would fail. I sympathize with this anxiety about failure. In my experience, it is quite common to be worried about failure and the idea of disappointing others, so it helps to address it.
There is a necessity, not to give more weight to words than that they truly deserve. To me, it is impossible to fail. You can't even call it bad decision-making. You make a decision, evaluate it based on what happens, and then make another decision based on the results. If something doesn't work out, you learn as much as you can from it and either find a better way to do it or do something else. That is all you can do.
There are two possible ways of looking at it. Either allow the negative results of your decisions (your "failures") to knock you down and keep you from trying anything new, or you begin to count your failures as successes. If you think about it, it makes perfect sense to look at the plans that don't work as a positive, because they usually direct us off in another direction. And there is always the possibility that the new direction will provide the results we are seeking.
Behind every failure is the potential for success, and if we give up too soon, we may never know what wonderful thing we could have accomplished. There is a story involving Edison, which illustrates this point perfectly. At one point Thomas Edison was supposedly asked by a reporter how it felt to have experienced 1,000 failures in inventing his light bulb, and the inventor allegedly replied, "I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to not make a light bulb." Can you imagine what life might be like if Edison had given up on the first try?
Plan and try... and believe that failure is just one learning step in life, while Success is only one step away.
