For many people, the fear of failure is their number-one fear — and that’s the thing that holds us back from growing in our personal and professional lives. Too often, people sit on the sidelines, waiting for everything to perfectly line up, but perfect alignment is never going to happen—at least not without a lot of effort.
If you don’t work toward your goals, if you don’t put in your time and effort to learn what works and what doesn’t, you can’t achieve success. Some might think that not getting in the game will keep them from losing, but all that does is guarantee they can’t win. Without failure, there is no learning. There’s no way to actually know whether something will work if we don’t try it.
When you step into your fear and go through something that feels uncomfortable and you come out on the other side—win or lose—you’ll have become an improved and wiser version of yourself. That improvement is a success in and of itself. If you didn’t reach your goal, it is still somewhere out in front of you waiting for you to keep working toward it with your new knowledge.
Many cutting-edge companies, including Facebook, have built their business philosophies around the idea of “failing fast” — trying as many ideas as possible and facing countless potential failures with the goal of finding ideas that will succeed. This system works because it teaches us to focus not on the failures, but on the successes we’ve reached because we’ve learned from the failures.
The only way you’re going to discover all of the greatness that exists inside of you is if you’re willing to move beyond the fear that you might fail. This journey won’t be easy. I recommend you find support to help you through that process. Be gentle with yourself, and start small. Above all, have faith that the journey is destined to bring you to success.
Yes, you may fail once or twice or, like Thomas Edison, you may fail 10,000 times, but don’t give up. I’m certain that everything you want, everything you are so deserving of, is on the other side of fear. It’s the perspective you take on failure that determines whether you learn from it or return to the sidelines. If you approach the possibility of failure with an open mind, if you’re willing to learn, eventually you’ll have all the tools and information you need to achieve your big success.
