My friend sent me this quote from Winston Churchill—“Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”
At first I thought, yeah, that’s so true. But as it sunk in I realized there are two false ideas in this short quote.
First, it implies that there is such thing as failure. Second, it implies that so-called failure should lead you to lose enthusiasm.
Rubbish!
One of my favorite ideas in all personal development is—There’s no such thing as failure, only feedback.
This means that the results you get are simply feedback to keep improving.
Think about the way a baby starts to walk. From crawling, it begins to prop itself up on furniture trying to take its first steps.
Nobody is watching that baby counting the number of times it fails to stand. The parents aren’t losing enthusiasm that their kid will one day walk!!
When Is Failure?
Similarly, think about the way you learned to ride a bike or even drive a car.
When it didn’t go right the first time. Or the second time. Or even the many dozens of times, you didn’t label yourself a failure and have to prevent yourself from losing enthusiasm.
In fact, every attempt that kept you moving closer to success likely only fired you up to keep trying even more.
This thing we call failure is a lie.
You can never fail so long as you keep up your enthusiasm for improving and taking steps.