Failure as Your Path to Resilience

Lessons from positive psychology

This is not a feel-good story about how good failure is and how it sets you up for success. Or how successful entrepreneurs succeeded because they first failed many times.

That is simply not true; these are lies by people trying to arbitrarily identify the magic formula for success. The truth is that there is no such formula. How will failure make you learn how to succeed? There are a million ways to fail, but just a few to succeed.

No, this is an article about how to learn from failure and to develop coping mechanisms to deal with it. This post is about resilience. It’s one of the superpowers that sets you up for greatness.

Failure is the antithesis of success. But what is success? Because we need to understand success before we know what failure is. Too often, we mix this up with what our consumption-obsessed society defines as success. A good paying job, a large house and other status symbols make you seem successful.

Success is instead about a sense of accomplishment and meaning. We will only get a sense of accomplishment when we have to work hard for something. It is about the struggle, and it is about making a meaningful contribution to others.

Failure, therefore, is very personal as each person is motivated by different work and rewards. However, most of us start with a twisted sense of what failure is. Is this when you get fired from your job? Or when you don’t get hired in the first place? Or are we failing when we’re making less than 50k per year?

Related posts:

Think about the last time you walked into a store and walked out with a new possession. Didn’t it feel good? Weren’t you like, yea, I totally can’t wait to use this! It’s easy to understand your own…

Roof safety rail is a great way to keep your employees safe while they’re on the job. They can help protect workers from falls that can lead to serious injuries. Whether you need a flat roof…

Texas is the oil state. In 2021, Texas was the top crude oil- and natural gas-producing state in the nation. And accounted for 43% of the nation’s crude oil production and 25% of its marketed natural…