I think it’s easy for us to believe that failure and giving up are the same thing. They both tend to have a negative connotation to them. You could almost say that giving up is failing, but giving up is also a choice we make, it is not the failure itself.
Failure is when the possible has now become somehow impossible or in more generous terms, the lack of success. You can fail without giving up. You can fail in almost infinite amounts really and still be moving forward with your actions and motivation. The key to not giving up is to take your failures and evaluate them. I mean really dissect them. We can learn a lot from the failures of others, but we learn the most from our own. That is because we are emotionally attached to those experiences.
So what can we learn from failure?
Sometimes all you have to do is start asking yourself a few questions. What do you think was the cause of your failure? Was it something in your control? Was it cause by a random variable or just pure bad luck? Sadly when things are outside of our own control, there is not much we can do. When you can define the things you had control of you can then take those things and make them better.
Maybe you procrastinated too much. Perhaps you didn’t seek any advice and ended up wasting a lot of time and money. Maybe you had your expectations set too high, only to result in failure for yourself. Sometimes failure is caused by impossible success we aim for. I honestly think that most of the time we tend to aim too high for ourselves. In a world full of fast paced competition and viral success, it’s easy to set your goals higher than the possible ones.
Success may actually be obtainable just by adjusting what we define success actually is. Making our goals possible to us personally rather than everyone else could be the solution. Not all of us are superstars or extreme winners. We are human beings with flaws, families, obligations and responsibilities. Not all of us can just give up everything in pursuit of one thing.
Of course, you can always argue that the impossible always manages to become possible for some people. You just be prepared for kind of adventure. It will not be easy with failure breathing down your neck.
