Does Failure Chip Away At Your Soul? Use It As A Super Power

I used to quit everything because I was secretly afraid of failure.

I was in high school participating in sports like most teenagers. But I was struggling with consistency and not finishing the sports that I started. When things got hard, I quit and moved on to something else. One day, my math teacher told me something that still rings bells in my mind every time I want to quit something. He told me that I quit everything that I started. At first, I had a hard time hearing it, but as time went on, those words continued to stick with me. And to this day, I think about them often.

I was talented at football but I quit that too. My life has been very unorthodox and didn’t take the traditional college route like everyone else. If I had stuck with football, I may have had an opportunity to go to college after high school. I did want the college experience. I often think about this mistake and sometimes I still feel regretful about quitting. Deep down inside, I was afraid of failing so I bailed out when things got tough.

Life is a great teacher and since then, I have learned many lessons from failure.

The feeling of regret is stronger than the feeling of failure.

If you decide to quit something and decide not to see it through, you will be haunted by the “what if” ghosts.

Quitting is a form of failure because you failed to finish what you started. The thought of quitting starts when the journey we started doesn’t meet our expectations. Let’s face it, failure sucks. It burns away at our soul like fire to paper. The more we desire something and don’t get what we want, the more it is going to hurt. But if you quit, it is the equivalent of being punched twice and getting knocked out. Not only did you quit but you also didn’t achieve your goal.

Failure doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom. You can use failure as a mental toughening tool. Trust me, with all of the adversity life will throw at you, you will need it. When you are able to lessen the emotional damages of failure, you are able to fail faster which in turn allows you to learn faster on your journey.

#1. Feel the pain of failure.

What we don’t confront will keep popping up like a pimple on a kid going through puberty. The first step in using failure as a superpower is to allow the pain to flow through you so you can have more self-awareness about the failure.

• Pick a sad song you like and listen to it, this will conjure feelings about your failure
• Give yourself some time to feel sorry for yourself so you can cleanse your mind and then pick yourself back up
• Look at the list of the things that you failed at, this will make you angry enough and force you to figure out what comes next

#2. Be transparent about your failures with others.

Oftentimes, when we fail, we run and hide because our egos are bruised. In this digital age of social media, it seems like everyone knows our business and this includes failures. When we are transparent about our failures, this tends to thicken our mental skin and we start to care less about what others think. The second step is to not hide from everyone when you fail.

• Write a blog about your failures and teach others what not to do
• Mentor others who are following a similar path as you
• Get creative and make “how to not” guides based on your failures

#3. Fail as much as you can

In the pursuit of goals, we focus so much on the pain of failures that we forget the lessons from them. The third step is to find the seeds of wisdom in each wisdom. If you can do this, you will start to become comfortable with failure and not view it as the boogeyman.

• Journal all of your failures
• List at least one thing you learned from each failure
• List each thing that you can improve on from each failure.

In the past, if I had viewed failure as a positive, who knows what path my life would have been on? I don’t necessarily regret quitting so many things but I won’t lie and say that I don’t have a few regrets. Failure is really a perception of how you view it. Rerouting a plan isn’t failure but quitting is.