“The great question is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with failure.”
-Chinese Proverb



Before you can succeed, you need to fail. You should expect it and accept it. Failure can breed new opportunities and new knowledge for you. So why wouldn’t you want to fail? You can either let failure prevent you from moving forward or you can utilize it to propel you to more success than you ever imagined. Which would you rather do? If you’re on this site, I would hope it’s the latter.

To help you turn failure into success, here are some things I’ve found that have worked.



Learn

Knowledge is the most valuable thing you can acquire from failure. What you learn cannot be taught in any school or by anyone. You must experience it yourself. Too many times, people shut out their failures when they should be examining them and keeping their failures in mind.

Here are some ways to maximize your learning potential:

~ Keep a timeline – Write down when you failed along with your successes.

~ Discover why you failed – Was your failure because of a lack of resources or because a lack of motivation?

~ What could you’ve done – Figure out what you could’ve done better or maybe didn’t need to do.

~ Get someone else’s opinion – Ask a friend or someone else, why they think you failed or what they saw wrong with your project and/or effort.



Get motivated

Failure is one of the greatest motivators. When you taste failure, you never want to taste it again. You also want to show yourself and others that you can succeed.

Here are a few ways to use failure to get motivated:

~ Think of even larger goals to achieve. Maybe your failed goals were too small and you failed for a reason.

~ Refresh your memory as to why you want to succeed. What do you desire and need to live the life you want?

~ Remember that other great achievers have failed as well. Failure was a key step to their success.



Adapt

After you have learned some priceless lessons from your failures it’s time to modify and adapt your plans and goals. Sometimes failures destroy your whole plans and require you to restart from scratch. Other times all you need to do is rethink your plans.

Here are some things you can do to adapt from failure:

~ Change time frames – Perhaps reaching your goals will take longer or less time than you first expected.

~ Move your plans around – You may want to move around items listed on your plans to tackle something first or later on.

~ Change approaches – Maybe you failed at an effort because your approach was wrong. Modify your approach and try again.



Spot opportunities

Failure can bring a whole new realm of opportunities to you. If you succeeded, you could have missed even bigger chances and opportunities.

Here are a few ways you can spot opportunities after failing:


~ If a business endeavor failed perhaps there wasn’t a demand for your product or service. Find out why people passed on your business and see what they really wanted. A whole new market could lie within those findings.

~ Capitalize on your failure by teaching others. Maybe you can help other people by preventing them from making the same mistakes you did. You can do so by writing a book, blogging, and maybe even by giving seminars.

~ Even in a failed endeavor, there’s a way you can make great contacts and friends. Use those contacts to move onto another project.



Those were just a few ways to turn failure into success. Never, ever, consider failing as the end, it’s only the beginning and a necessary step before you can reach the top. Once you’ve felt failure, you’ll appreciate success a 100 times more.