Failing Forward

Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm- Winston Churchill

I intended to publish this post last month but somehow got distracted. In retrospect, I believe I wasn’t fully qualified to give an opinion at that point in time. As I write though, I fully understand what it means to fail because as it were, I just got a second degree in failing. Lol.

A good number of us have had life rosy. Success has been easy in many areas, we’ve not had to struggle or fight for what we deserved or needed. God’s grace has done for us even the things we needed to do by ourselves. On the flip side of the coin, some cheat and get away with it. However, we should not forget that work is required for anything to genuinely work. You will reach a point where you will have to eat the fruits of your labour^a.

My point is this; failure gives you something. It gives you energy. As a science student I know that energy cannot be destroyed but can be converted. Some convert it to fear and it grounds them. I channel it as a fuel. My failure makes me angry, it fuels a passion in me that makes me mad enough to want to try again, and succeed.

Of course it’s kind of painful because my initial efforts seemed my best at the time, but I was wrong, I could be more than I was, do more than i did.

In airplanes, there is what we call a super charger and it is usually an inbuilt feature for engines. It works by taking exhaust air (air already used) and then recycling it to boost the aircraft’s performance. Good news is we all have built in super chargers. Until failing super charges you, you’ll be in the cycle of ‘doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.’¹

It is not in the number of times you have failed; it’s a question of what you’ve done with that experience, what it has created in you. This is probably why there are very few exceptionally successful people in the world.

I have observed for a fact that any successful person/mentor will have at least one story of how they failed in an area, and the changes that failure effected in their lives to bring them to where they are today.

‘You never get the explanation of why you had to go through something until you come out of it victorious. So keep walking and don’t look back.’²

The BEST thing about going through hell is....... YOU COME OUT ON FIRE!!³

^aPsm 128:2, ¹Albert Einstein, ²Pastor Poju Oyemade, ³Kimberly Jones Pothier