How To Frame Your Failures To Better Yourself

Failing does not have to mean your a failure.

Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash

I’m not going to lie. I have been writing online on and off for the better part of 4 years now. There’s been some months where my consistency of writing hasn’t been at its best and it cost me dearly at times. 

I would write an article that would get over 5k views in a month, feel good about myself then another one would barely get to a hundred. 

In fact, a majority of articles I would write would barely get to that one hundred number. 

The failures became discouraging. It made me want to give up but I enjoy writing so I can never give up. Writing is a part of me and if I am going to write, I might as well practice in public and get real-world feedback on it. 

I took a moment to reflect on my failures and my successes over time and it led me to appreciate the reality of how far I’ve come. 

Failure Teaches You No One Cares

If you put yourself out there enough, eventually you will realize that no one cares. Everyone is caught up in their own bubble, the likelihood of them giving you a thought today is low. 

You can look at this in two ways: 

• You either feel isolated and lonely. 

• You feel liberated to do what you want. 

I chose the ladder. There’s nothing more liberating than to realize that no one cares about anything that you do unless it impacts them. 

That article you’re writing that you think might be polarizing probably isn’t. No one is going to care what your thoughts are, especially people who are strangers. 

Dare to hit publish without a care, because no one else does. Stop thinking so highly of yourself. 

Failure Gives You Correct Action

When I attempted to run my first 100-mile ultra marathon, I failed. It was a tough pill to swallow and I worked that hard to get to it and could not succeed. 

This ended up being the best motivation for me. 

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Failure has you confront your insane ways. 

If you never step into the arena to test your skills, how are you going to know if you are good enough or need to take corrective action? 

Some of history’s biggest figures failed over and over again. 

Thomas Edison failed over a thousand times before he finally invented the light bulb and movie projector. He was deemed unteachable in school. 

As important as it is to figure out what you need to do, figuring out what not to do is as important. 

Failure Teaches You Resilience

Everyone is going to fail at some point in their life at something. The people who fail once or twice and give up are the people who end up coasting through an unremarkable life. 

Rarely is there someone who comes out of the gates and hits on everything they do. 

One thing that failure will teach you is that if you do not succeed, you will be okay and you will figure it out. You will learn that your life is not going to be over because you know you will never quit. 

Resilience is something that can only be taught by putting yourself into situations you need to be resilient. 

Why not give yourself the opportunity to teach yourself this life skill? 

Failing Fast Is The Most Important Kind Of Failure

Imagine the failures that you had years ago. What did you do about them? 

Did you fail fast and try again? Or did you let it sit and never resolve it? 

The longer you let a failure go unresolved, it becomes a bigger mountain mentally. Your memory of the failure becomes distorted over time as most memories do and you think that it’s a bigger mountain to climb than it actually is. 

Learn to fail fast because if you don’t, it’ll become harder to resolve in the future. 

Conclusion

Failure can be an important teacher. All of us will fail at something at some point in our lives. Some failures will sting more than others. If you fail at something, it doesn’t mean that you have to resolve it either. I’m not that good at bowling but that doesn’t mean that I need to spend all my waking hours to make sure that I’m not a failure at bowling. 

That might be a silly example but you have to choose what is important to you. If something is important to you, make sure that you try your hardest to make sure that you succeed. All it takes is one success and other successes can keep on rolling. 

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Have you been struggling with your failures? That’s why I made a sheet with journal prompts for you to uncover what your failures can teach you moving forward. Look here to get the journal prompts.