TEN AUDACIOUS REASONS TO FAIL

Over the past year, the world has witnessed a series of colossal failures: Bank closings, real estate foreclosures, huge corporations going broke...the list goes on and on. Sometimes it seems as if failure is rewarded as in the mega-billion dollar corporate bailouts. For the rest of us average folks, failure can be ruthless and often no fault of our own. And we don't get no stinkin' bailouts. I got to pondering the merits of success and failure and I realized that even though we all would much rather succeed...it behooves the human spirit to experience failure every so often. Failure can actually be an audaciously good thing and here's why:

1. It didn't hurt Conan O'Brien. He got fired and forty million dollars.

2. Failure is empowering. We gain knowledge and insight from our blunders which provide a powerful incentive not to repeat the same mistakes. 

3. Failure builds character. If we're able to shake off disappointment, renew our determination, accept responsibility and not wallow in self-pity, we become stronger, self-reliant  and more likely to find solutions.

4. Failure can be awe-inspiring. We screwed up. So we're not perfect. Who cares? We're still alive and we've learned things that we didn't know before which makes us wiser and better off than when we started.

5. Failure offers us positive opportunities...to examine what went wrong, explore better ideas or experiment with totally different strategies.

6. Failure gives us freedom...to accept what happened and move on...or not. We can choose to discard the negative and rise above the ordinary. We can take calculated risks and learn to become fearless.

7. It's part of the creative process. We should embrace failure as one step closer to achieving our goal. Failure encourages us to think outside the box. It spurs our creativity and ignites our imagination. We should capitalize on our mistakes and not be embarrassed by them...unless we're John Edwards or Tiger Woods.


8. Failure separates our loyal friends from fair-weather ones and identifies who we can rely on for support when the going gets tough.

9. Failure gives us a fresh start. It expands our horizons and emboldens us to dump the bad stuff and turn adversity into advantage.

10. Failure teaches us a valuable lesson in survival. We either succumb to the depths of our misery or we regroup, reflect, reinvent and recognize that "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new".....Albert Einstein. Sphere: Related Content