The fact of failure

WE HATE losers, and we love winners. Failure is sometimes considered the unpardonable sin. We canonise champions and adore achievers, so everybody wants to succeed. The overemphasis on success puts enormous stress on our society because failure is an unavoidable part of life, yet nobody wants to be called or considered ‘a failure’. Many people will do anything in order to avoid failure, including lie, cheat, steal, and lower their standards or morals.

Failure is the one thing we don’t want to be labelled as, and as a result, we fear it. We’re afraid of what it might do to us and what will happen to us. What will other people think? Will I be rejected? Will anybody love me? Will I be considered worthless? It’s a universal fear, and it causes many people an enormous amount of stress in their lives.

The fear of failure can cause us to be indecisive because we’re worried about what choice to make and whether it’s the wrong choice. It can also cause us to be workaholics. We work and overwork, trying to keep up, trying to get ahead, and stay ahead. The fear of failure can cause us to be a perfectionist where we’re always worried that what we do is never good enough to meet the critique of people. It causes us to never be quite satisfied because we’re afraid people won’t like what or how we do something, and we’ll be looked at as a failure.

The truth is that failure is a part of life. If we’re going to be all that God has called us to be, we have to embrace the fact that we will fail sometimes, even though we can seek to minimise our mistakes and failures, the issue isn’t how to keep from failing, but how to survive and recover from failure.

Everybody fails. Ecclesiastes 7:20 (GNT) tells us,“There is no one on earth who does what is right all the time and never makes a mistake.” Nobody’s perfect. The closest we’re ever going to get to perfection is perhaps what we write on our resumes. On it we only describe our successes and the best things we’ve ever done. Even those who are the best at what they do, don’t do it right all the time. Superstars fail. Pro basketball players miss, on average, 50 per cent of the shots that they take. We need to know that failure isn’t final.

When we fail, we often exaggerate the effects of those failures. We blow them out of proportion, but it’s not the end of the world. When we fail, we should pick ourselves up and go on. The fear of failure is far more damaging to our life than failure itself. Studies show that the more talented we are, the more we tend to fear failure. In other words, people fear failure most in the area in which they’re gifted. Much of that stress comes from the perfect performances that we think are required. Failure is universal, but it’s not fatal. The scripture states: “For a righteous man falls seven times, and always gets back up.” Proverbs 24:16.

The only difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that successful people never quit. They fail as much, if not more than, the unsuccessful, but they simply get up and keep on going - they don’t quit when they fail. They’re persistent, determined, and diligent. They have endurance and keep on going after they’ve fallen. They have discovered the secret of recovering, and to be successful, we need to practice it, too.