Whoever you are, whatever you do, you will not escape it. You will necessarily experience failure in your life. And when I say failure, I mean failure in the plural. You will experience a lot of failures. You will make a lot of mistakes as well.
That’s the way life is.
Of course, you’ll only remember the great overnight successes that the media keeps praising. It is obvious that success makes you dream more, and therefore sell more. Under these conditions, no one wastes their time writing stories about people who have failed.
Success makes you lose sight of the fact that failure is an integral part of the process
This is very damaging because it is in failure that we learn the most in life. Success must be seen as a lousy teacher, as Bill Gates once explained:
“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”
Even smart people, and especially smart people I would like to say, let themselves be exhilarated by success thinking that they can never fail again. Under these conditions, they will not make the same efforts that allowed them to achieve success the first time.
The return to Earth will be very complicated afterward. These people will fail without even understanding why they couldn’t stay at the top.
A failure is a necessary option if you want to achieve great success
Failure teaches you a lot if you understand it correctly. To understand failure in the right way, you should not be afraid of it. And this is where these two sentences from Elon Musk advice come in:
“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing you are not innovating.”
Achieving great things in life is mostly through innovation. If you want to innovate like Elon Musk, you have to accept that failure is an option.
Those who do things where failure is not an option do not innovate. If you aim for things that are not outside your comfort zone, you will achieve minor successes that will not change your life.
When you look at Elon Musk advice, you only see his big successes with Tesla or SpaceX. Nevertheless, Elon Musk has had many failures in his life like all entrepreneurs.
Elon Musk uses his failures to build future successes
The difference with the common people is that Elon Musk was looking for those failures to progress. The only way to progress after a failure is to analyze correctly the reasons for this failure. Once you understand why you failed, you will have to adapt to try another way.
That’s where the secret lies.
90% of people who fail don’t even try again. 9% of other people that fail will try again only a few times. Finally, only a tiny minority of people, about 1%, will keep trying until they reach their goal.
To be able to do this, you must have extraordinary strength of character and a will of steel.
Every failure brings you closer to success
Elon Musk is the type of investor who has this mindset. In history, others before him have had this winning mindset. I’m thinking in particular of Thomas Edison, who invented many things that still impact our daily lives today.
Regarding failure, Thomas Edisons saw it this way:
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
That’s how you have to look at failure, too. If you do, then you will understand that failure is an integral part of success. How you react to failure is what differentiates winners from losers. It’s up to you to take advantage of it to adapt and join the winning side.
