You can not have success without this. There is no human being who ever lived that did not have this before they ultimately succeeded.

Many try to avoid it, and go way out of their way to side step the experience. But it is inevitable that this must occur. For without this there is no experience.

Failure is part of every success.

Thomas Edison said, “I failed my way to success.” Failure for most people is embarrassing, fear producing, triggers procrastination, and for many is damaging to their self image. That’s ridiculous—because you cannot have great success without going through failure.

I’ve heard that failure is the opposite of success—it’s not. Failure is just one component of getting from where you are to where you ultimately desire to be. Success blooms from the dirt and ashes of failure.

Again, going back to Edison, he said that when one of his experiments failed, it was actually a success. Because he’d learned another way that the project couldn’t be done, so he’d succeeded in learning and gathering more information. He said he was actually in better shape after each experiment, because he knew more than when he started.

What does it take to play a concert in Carnegie Hall—missing millions of notes over a period of years. What does it take to succeed in professional baseball—striking out countless times. What does it take to become a great carpenter—bending buckets full of nails and ruining lots of building materials.

Through learning what is not going to work, you open the door to new possibilities. You are given the opportunity to grow and learn.

The process of failing is uncomfortable—for just about everyone. Yet the greatest accomplishments are always the result of many failures. The highest achievers know this and accept it as part of the process. They don’t give up, they analyze and move forward.

Not one of us begins with the hope of failing. But realistically we need to know that there is a good chance that it will occur, or at a minimum, that there will be mediocre first results. So, just get out there and go again.

When you learn to see a mistake or failure as a step on the way to success, life gets much easier. Because the errors experienced along the way, are not an end point. They are just signals for course corrections, that will lead you ever closer to success.