How to Make A Good Comeback
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Failure is never fun, but it is an essential prerequisite for success in life. As author Denis Waitley said, “A failure is like fertilizer. It stinks to be sure, but it makes things grow faster in the future.” Here’s how the most successful people learn from their defeats and come back stronger than ever:
- They acknowledge failure, but they’re not defeated by it.
When you have a winning mindset, you don’t see a defeat as the end of the road. Instead, you accept that failure is just another, often necessary, stepping-stone to success. As Winston Churchill once said, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.”
- They learn from failure.
Failure is a side-effect of innovation: sometimes you win, sometimes you learn! The most important thing is that you take the time to assess where things went wrong and then learn from your mistakes. Remember, FAIL stands for First Attempt at Learning.
- They believe failure is temporary, not permanent.
Failure is a teacher, not an undertaker. Just because you fail at something doesn’t mean it’s over for good. Far from it! Readjust your mindset and come to think of failure as success in progress – a temporary blip, not a permanent state of events.
Here are some tips to get over failure and make a strong comeback:
- Fail fast
Research suggests that the faster you fail, the better your chances of success. Furthermore, the more time between attempts, the more likely you are to fail again. So, if you have to fail, get it over with quickly and then get back to work!
- Reflect to recover
If you spend time at the end of your day reflecting on what went wrong and why, you will go on to perform better. If you don’t self-reflect, you learn nothing from the defeat. As John Dewey said, “We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.”
- Pivot to restart
Failure is a detour, not a dead end. To win, you have to find the energy to start again. Making that extra effort is what will pay off and result in phenomenal success.
In every great book of success, there are chapters of failure. No matter the difficulties and the challenges you experience, however, you can always make a great comeback and be an inspiration to others. Failure is an inescapable part of life but, as Henry Ford said, it is also the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. To learn more, listen to the latest episode of “It’s a Good Life”.
