Learning, is (i) being taught (ii) teaching yourself. This means that you must, as you have no choice, learn in and outside curricula, through the formed and the unformed. Failure is a vital point of reference you need as you teach yourself. It is part of the unformed that does not shape how you think and act but how you think about thinking. It drives your meta-thinking and it reshapes your mindset.
If one thing does not require an abstract method of doing it. It simply means when you do you do it as per intuition rather than intellect. But I think we have to avoid putting “learning from failure” into an intuition bracket and start to look for the methods men and women should better learn from failure.
- Present yourself with many opportunities to fail, i.e try
If you try as many times as you can, you present yourself with so much likelihood of failure. That being said, you do not have to hesitate to try. As you try do not be scared of failure. Keep doing it until the end, past the moment you realise that you have failed. This gives you the whole piece of failure rather than a quint-size of it.
Trying is not for people in well-to-do families. Anyone can try. When life presents you with the privilege of choosing between your comfort zone and trying, pick up the latter. It is a vital teacher. It will always give you a lesson in case you fail, a good mark of progress when you pass.
- Learn from other’s failures, too
You will not fail as much as you are required by life. You, therefore, do not have any choice but to look at where others failed as well and learn from it. Mistakes we make in life are meant to correct a generation. We must not be afraid to share them with all those behind us. We must not use them to mislead those behind us.
It is vital to fully understand each failure you can learn from. But lessons from failure build from the emotional attachment one has to the pursuit he failed on. Thus, learning from other people’s failures is not as educating as learning from your own. Other people’s failures lack your vision and are filled with plans with meanings you can’t decipher.
- Keep a record
Keep an abstract record of the build-up to the failure, the failure itself and your reaction to it is possible. You can maintain a diary. The record saves the details for future use and covers blanks in your mind’s memory. A painter keeps his earlier paintings intact no matter how poor they are. An inventor keeps in his garage prototypes of an engine that failed to run and he finds continuity after failure.
Forgetting failure is refusing to learn from it. Failure is quick to forgive those who preserve the lessons in it for future use. You learn from past failures that you didn’t erase from your view. If it’s a wine that turned into vinegar you still need to keep tasting it, feel it and see it.
- Count the failure among other failures
It is from a list of failures where trends can discovered. You don’t see the trends in just one failure. Trends can help you to separate a cause from a problem. A problem is a persistent cause of failure in your life that does not give up after causing one or two failures.
Individuals deal with problems by either finding a solution or adapting. A mere cause of a failure is not a problem you must fix. It has less likelihood of repeating itself.
- Keep working on your definition of success
Sometimes we fail in our lives simply because our definition of success is too shallow. Failure itself suggests to us how that definition can be made better. In trying and failing we see the lands further than we used to explore. This, itself, is an opportunity to consider those lands part of our goals.
- Learn to classify failure as failures
Some people who failed in some respects did not see themselves as failures. This is also the reason they failed to learn from failures. Failing to learn from failure is a failure, too.
After a failure or a blunder, you need to follow up with the right actions. It is therefore vital to know a blunder or a failure just after it becomes one that to live unconscious of it.
- Learn to appreciate failure
Lessons from failure are of a different kind. They cannot be found elsewhere. We must highly price them. Failure is an undercoat paint that does not shine when we line up our final exterior finish of success.
We have to appreciate this undercoat for it to be useful while we try to paint our lives with success.
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