Learning From Failing
by Robert Imbriale

Have you ever failed at something in your life? I'll bet that you have. All of us have and it's nothing to be ashamed of. Failing is perfectly normal.

Many of us went to school and were actually punished for making mistakes. Now you may find it hard to believe, but it really is impossible to succeed unless you have first failed. That is, as long as you are willing to learn from your mistakes.

You see, if you try to do something and it doesn't turn out as you'd expected, you've still succeeded. You've successfully learned that what you did was not the way to get what it was that you were after.

Failing, in and of itself, is an integral part of the learning process that we, as human beings, must go through in order to advance ourselves in life. The challenge isn't in the process of failing, or making a mistake, it's in how we were trained to respond to our mistakes. Most people will try anything once. If they fail, they will likely never try again. Or, if they do try again, they won't let anybody know about it!

Many of the most successful people in our society today have failed many more times than they have succeeded. The only difference between them and you is that they kept at it until they found a way to make it work.

It is said that Thomas Edison "failed" at his attempts to invent the light bulb over 10,000 times. When he was asked how he kept going, he simply believed that what he had in fact done was discover 10,000 ways NOT to invent the light bulb!

He never looked upon any of his attempts as failures. Instead, he saw them as a chance to learn and today you and I can sit by a lamp and read this article because of this man's belief in success and his not believing in failure!

One thing you can do right now to begin moving yourself more in the direction that you want to go is begin looking ever action you take, every move you make as having no other possible outcome than being successful.

Did you get that? Think of EVERY action you take, every move you make, every phone call you make as a success, no matter what the outcome!

You will always succeed at producing some sort of result. It may not be exactly what you had in mind, but you will ALWAYS succeed at producing some sort of result.

Thomas Edison looked at every attempt to invent the light bulb as a success, even though he did not achieve what he had set out to accomplish. Think about it.

Had he considered his every attempt a failure, how many failures do you think he would have endured before he would have quit? My guess is that you'd be sitting in the dark right now if he had.

I believe that the only failure in life is the failure to take action. If you do nothing, nothing will happen. If you do something, anything at all, you will succeed in producing a result. In other words, you will create success in your life.

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